In the Break · May Joseph, David Eng, Barbara Browning, Nahum Chandler, Paul Kottman, Karen...

In the Break

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In the Break

The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

Fred Moten

University of Minnesota PressMinneapolis • London

Copyright 2003 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

Portions of chapter 1 were originally published as “Voices/Forces: Migration, Surplus, and the BlackAvant-Garde,” in Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language, edited by Brandon LaBelle and ChristofMigone (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2001); reprinted by permission of Errant Bodies Press.Portions of chapter 1 also appeared as “Sound in Florescence: Cecil Taylor Floating Garden,” inSound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, edited by Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1998); copyright 1998 by the University of North CarolinaPress; reprinted by permission of the University of North Carolina Press. An earlier version ofchapter 2 appeared as “From Ensemble to Improvisation,” in Hambone 16 (Fall 2002); reprinted bypermission of Hambone. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as “Black Mo’nin’ in the Sound ofthe Photograph,” in Loss, edited by David Kazanjian and David Eng (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2002); copyright 2002 by the Regents of the University of California; reprinted bypermission of the University of California Press.

Translated poetry by Antonin Artaud in chapter 1 originally appeared in WatchWends and RackScreams: Works from the Final Period, edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman and Bernard Bador(Boston: Exact Change, 1995); reprinted courtesy of Exact Change. Lush Life, by Billy Strayhorn,copyright 1949 (renewed) by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP) and Tempo Music Corporation(BMI); all rights administered by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP); international copyrightsecured; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission. Lines from “The Dead Lecturer,” by AmiriBaraka, in chapter 2 are reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.; copyright 1964 byAmiri Baraka.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other-wise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moten, Fred.In the break : the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition / Fred

Moten.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.ISBN 0-8166-4099-8 (HC : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8166-4100-5 (PB : alk. paper)1. African Americans—Intellectual life. 2. African Americans—Politics and

government. 3. Radicalism—United States. 4. African American aesthetics.5. African American arts. 6. Arts—Political aspects—United States. I. Title.

E185 .M895 2003700 .89 96073—dc21

2002151661

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

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http://www.upress.umn.edu

black radicalism cannot be understood within the particular

context of its genesis . . .

—Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism

. . . an insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion . . .

—Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook

Contents

Acknowledgments XI

Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream 1

1. The Sentimental Avant-Garde

Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love 25

Voices/Forces 31

Sound in Florescence (Cecil Taylor Floating Garden) 41

Praying with Eric 63

2. In the Break

Tragedy, Elegy 85

The Dark Lady and the Sexual Cut 102

German Inversion 122

’Round the Five Spot 149

3. Visible Music

Baldwin’s Baraka, His Mirror Stage,

the Sound of His Gaze 171

Black Mo’nin’ in the Sound of the Photograph 192

Tonality of Totality 211

Resistance of the Object: Adrian Piper’s Theatricality 233

Notes 255

Index 307

All love and thanks to my comrade and companion, Laura Harris.I hope my work is animated by the material spirit of my beautiful

grandparents, Marie and Charlie Jenkins.Thanks to my sister and brother, Glynda White and Mike Davis,

for everything; my aunt, Bertha Marks, my cousin, Rev. L. T. Marks,and all of my family in Kingsland, New Edinburgh, and all parts northand west; and Q. B., Eloise, Valorie, Dalorie, and Tony Bush for lettingme be part of their family.

Mark and Susan Harris have sustained Laura and me throughdifWcult times with great generosity and love.

I want to thank my mentors Martin Kilson and Julian Boyd for theirknowledge, support, and time. In both of them, the richest style movesin perfect harmony with the deepest substance.

William Corbett, Masao Miyoshi, Avital Ronell, Ann BanWeld,Stephen Booth, Herman Rapaport, Kathryne Lindberg, Cedric Robin-son, Hortense Spillers, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka, Samuel R. Delany,Cecil Taylor, and above all Nathaniel Mackey have been invaluableexamples.

The sense of working together on a collective project with AlanJackson, Errol Louis, Steve Harney, Eric Chandler, Akira Lippit, SethMoglen, Avery Gordon, Chris NewWeld, Josie Saldaña, David Kazanjian,

Acknowledgments

XI

May Joseph, David Eng, Barbara Browning, Nahum Chandler, PaulKottman, Karen Hadley, Sandra Gunning, Kate McCullough, Mary PatBrady, Stephanie Smith, José Muñoz, and Tom Sheehan (my spiritualcoauthor) has meant everything to me.

Laurie Chandler, Joe Torra, Alice Key, Kate Butler, Gwen Rahner,Maya Miller, Alycee Lane, Kevin Kopelson, Doris Witt, Max Thomas,Margaret Bass, Helene Moglen, Anna McCarthy, Herman Bennett,André Lepecki, Angela Dillard, Phil Harper, Bob Stam, Robin Kelley,Saidiya Hartman, Farah GrifWn, Jason King, Anita Cherian, LaraNielsen, Heather Schuster, Tracie Morris, Abdul-Karim Mustapha,Eric Neel, Kevin Floyd, Hakan Dibel, Cynthia Oliver, Phil Round,Linda Bolton, Dee Morris, Brooks Landon, Ed Folsom, Fred Woodard,David Depew, Mary Depew, Mary Ann Rasmussen, Stephen Vlastos,John Nelson, Alan Weiss, Christof Migone, Richard Schechner, JenniferFink, Lisa Duggan, Lauren Berlant, Laurence Rickels, Julie Carlson,Peggy Phelan, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg,Randy Martin, Charles Rowell, Ange Mlinko, Jim Behrle, and MurrayJackson have been supportive friends, editors, and colleagues.

I thank José Muñoz and Laura Harris for reading all of the man-uscript and Sarah Cervenak for her help with the index.

Robert O’Meally accepted me with grace and friendship into theJazz Study Group he convenes at Columbia University. The chance tojoin the scholars he brings together has been a highlight of my intellec-tual life and very important to the work I have tried to do in this book.

Over the past three or four years, in the course of Wnishing this book,I have often returned to Stanley Cavell’s words at the end of A Pitchof Philosophy: “Am I ready to vow . . . that I have the ear, that I knowmy mother’s mother tongue of music to be also mine?” My mother,B Jenkins, taught me the value of trying to reach for something and inher “absence” that value, the essence of her tradition, dawns on me everymorning in a different way as old and new desire. I want to go as far outfrom where she was as she wanted me to go, all the way back to herground and line. All my work is dedicated to her with all my love.

XII – ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can anddo resist.1 Blackness—the extended movement of a speciWc upheaval, anongoing irruption that anarranges every line—is a strain that pressuresthe assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity.While subjectivity is deWned by the subject’s possession of itself andits objects, it is troubled by a dispossessive force objects exert such thatthe subject seems to be possessed—infused, deformed—by the object itpossesses. I’m interested in what happens when we consider the phonicmateriality of such propriative exertion. Or, to invoke and diverge fromSaidiya Hartman’s fundamental work and phrasing, I’m interested in theconvergence of blackness and the irreducible sound of necessarily visualperformance at the scene of objection.

Between looking and being looked at, spectacle and spectator-ship, enjoyment and being enjoyed, lies and moves the economy of whatHartman calls hypervisibility. She allows and demands an investigationof this hypervisibility in its relation to a certain musical obscurity andopens us to the problematics of everyday ritual, the stagedness of theviolently (and sometimes amelioratively) quotidian, the essential dramaof black life, as Zora Neale Hurston might say. Hartman shows hownarrative always echoes and redoubles the dramatic interenactment of“contentment and abjection,” and she explores the massive discourse ofthe cut, of rememberment and redress, that we always hear in narratives

Resistance of the Object:Aunt Hester’s Scream

1

where blackness marks simultaneously both the performance of theobject and the performance of humanity. She allows us to ask: whathave objectiWcation and humanization, both of which we can think inrelation to a certain notion of subjection, to do with the essential his-toricity, the quintessential modernity, of black performance? Whateverruns off us, a certain offense runs through us. This is a double ambiva-lence that requires analyses of looking and being looked at; such gamerequires, above all, some thinking about the opposition of spectacle androutine, violence and pleasure. This thinking is Hartman’s domain.

A critique of the subject animates Hartman’s work. It bears thetrace, therefore, of a movement exempliWed by an aspect of Judith But-ler’s massive theoretical contribution wherein the call to subjectivityis understood also as a call to subjection and subjugation and appeals forredress or protection to the state or to the structure or idea of citizen-ship—as well as modes of radical performativity or subversive imper-sonation—are always already embedded in the structure they wouldescape.2 But if Hartman moves in this Weld she also moves in anothertradition that forces another kind of questioning. Consulting FrederickDouglass on all of this is mandatory and the best place to consult him isin the moments when he describes and reproduces black performance.But this is to move in the tradition of a mode of reading Douglass thatconXates his story (and its graphic and emblematic primal scene) withthe story of slavery and freedom; this is to risk an uncritical covering ofthe assertion of Douglass’s originarity; this is to approach the nataloccasion that our musico-political tradition must evade. In order tosidestep this problematic, Hartman has both to avoid and to arrive atDouglass, must both repress and return to him.

Everything moves, for Hartman, after an opening decision regard-ing these questions of comportment:

The “terrible spectacle” that introduced Frederick Douglass to slavery

was the beating of his Aunt Hester. . . . By locating this “horrible exhi-

bition” in the Wrst chapter of his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick

Douglass, Douglass establishes the centrality of violence to the making of

2 – RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT

the slave and identiWes it as an original generative act equivalent to the

statement “I was born.” The passage through the blood-stained gate is

an inaugural moment in the formation of the enslaved. In this regard, it

is a primal scene. By this I mean that the terrible spectacle dramatizes the

origin of the subject and demonstrates that to be a slave is to be under the

brutal power and authority of another; this is conWrmed by the event’s

placement in the opening chapter on genealogy.

I have chosen not to reproduce Douglass’s account of the beating

of Aunt Hester in order to call attention to the ease with which such

scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circu-

lated, and the consequences of this routine display of the slave’s ravaged

body. Rather than inciting indignation, too often they immure us to pain

by virtue of their familiarity—the oft-repeated or restored character of

these accounts and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical

language usually resorted to in describing these instances—and especially

because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering. What

interests me are the ways we are called upon to participate in such

scenes. . . . At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the un-

certain line between witness and spectator. Only more obscene than the

brutality unleashed at the whipping post is the demand that this suffering

be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or end-

less recitations of the ghastly and terrible. In light of this, how does one

give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference

to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle or con-

tend with the narcissistic identiWcation that obliterates the other or the

prurience that too often is the response to such displays? This was the

challenge faced by Douglass and the other foes of slavery, and this is

the task I take up here.

Therefore, rather than try to convey the routinized violence of

slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the ter-

rible, I have chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which

terror can hardly be discerned. . . . By defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope

to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit

the shocking spectacle. What concerns me here is the diffusion of terror

RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT – 3

and the violence perpetrated under the rubric of pleasure, paternalism and

property.3

The decision not to reproduce the account of Aunt Hester’s beating is,in some sense, illusory. First, it is reproduced in her reference to andrefusal of it; second, the beating is reproduced in every scene of sub-jection the book goes on to read—in both the ritual performancescombining terror and enjoyment in slavery and the fashionings andassertions of citizenship and “free” subjectivity after emancipation. Thequestion here concerns the inevitability of such reproduction even inthe denial of it. This is the question of whether the performance ofsubjectivity—and the subjectivity that Hartman is interested in hereis deWnitely performed—always and everywhere reproduces what liesbefore it; it is also the question of whether performance in general is everoutside the economy of reproduction.4 This is not to say that Hartmantries but cannot make disappear the originary performance of the violentsubjection of the slave’s body. Indeed, Hartman’s considerable, formida-ble, and rare brilliance is present in the space she leaves for the ongoing(re)production of that performance in all its guises and for a criticalawareness of how each of those guises is always already present in anddisruptive of the supposed originarity of that primal scene. What arethe politics of this unavoidably reproducible and reproductive perfor-mance? What is held in the ongoing disruption of its primality? Whatshape must a culture take when it is so (un)grounded? What does thisdisturbance of capture and genesis give to black performance?

Douglass’s is a primal scene for complex reasons that have to dowith the connectedness of desire, identiWcation, and castration thatHartman displaces onto the Weld of the mundane and the quotidian,where pain is alloyed with pleasure. However, this displacement some-how both acknowledges and avoids the vexed question of the possibil-ity of pain and pleasure mixing in the scene and in its originary andsubsequent recountings. For Hartman the very specter of enjoyment isreason enough to repress the encounter. So lingering in the psychoana-lytic break is crucial in the interest of a certain set of complexities that


cannot be overlooked but must be traced back to this origin precisely inthe interest of destabilizing its originarity and originarity in general, adestabilization Douglass founds in his original recitation, which is alsoan originary repression. It’s the ongoing repression of the primal sceneof subjection that one wants to guard against and linger in. Douglasspasses on a repression that Hartman’s critical suppression extends. Suchtransfer demands that one ask if every recitation is a repression and ifevery reproduction of a performance is its disappearance. Douglass andHartman confront us with the fact that the conjunction of reproductionand disappearance is performance’s condition of possibility, its ontologyand its mode of production. The recitation of Douglass’s repression, therepression embedded in his recitation, is there in Hartman as well. LikeDouglass, she transposes all that is unspeakable in the scene to later,ritualized, “soulfully” mundane and quotidian performances. All that’smissing is the originary recitation of the beating, which she reproducesin her reference to it. This is to say that there is an intense dialogue withDouglass that structures Scenes of Subjection. The dialogue is opened bya refusal of recitation that reproduces what it refuses. Hartman swervesaway from Douglass and thereby runs right back to him. She also runsthrough him into territory he could not have recognized, territory noone has charted as thoroughly and as convincingly as she has done.Still, this turn away from Douglass that is also a turn to and throughDouglass is a disturbance that is neither unfamiliar nor unfamilial. Inthe Break addresses such resemblance by way of the following questions:Is there a way to disrupt the totalizing force of the primality Douglassrepresents? Is there a way to subject this unavoidable model of subjec-tion to a radical breakdown?

My attempt to address these questions will, I hope, justify anotherengagement with the terribly beautiful music of Douglass’s recitationsof the beating of his Aunt Hester. The engagement moves initiallythrough and against Karl Marx, by way of Abbey Lincoln and MaxRoach. I want to show the interarticulation of the resistance of theobject with Marx’s subjunctive Wgure of the commodity who speaks.According to Marx, the speaking commodity is an impossibility invoked


only to militate against mystifying notions of the commodity’s essentialvalue. My argument starts with the historical reality of commoditieswho spoke—of laborers who were commodities before, as it were, theabstraction of labor power from their bodies and who continue to passon this material heritage across the divide that separates slavery and“freedom.” But I am interested, Wnally, in the implications of the break-ing of such speech, the elevating disruptions of the verbal that take therich content of the object’s/commodity’s aurality outside the conWnesof meaning precisely by way of this material trace. More speciWcallywith regard to Douglass’s prefatory scene and its subsequent restagings,I’m interested in establishing some procedures for discovering the rela-tionship between the “heart-rending shrieks” of Aunt Hester in the faceof the master’s violent assault, the discourse on music that Douglassinitiates a few pages after the recitation of that vicious encounter, andthe incorporation or recording of a sound Wgured as external both tomusic and to speech in black music and speech.

In his critical deployment of such music and speech, Douglass dis-covers a hermeneutic that is simultaneously broken and expanded byan operation akin to what Jacques Derrida refers to as “invagination.”5

This cut and augmented hermeneutic circle is structured by a doublemovement. The Wrst element is the transference of a radically exterioraurality that disrupts and resists certain formations of identity and in-terpretation by challenging the reducibility of phonic matter to verbalmeaning or conventional musical form. The second is the assertion ofwhat Nathaniel Mackey calls “‘broken’ claim(s) to connection”6 betweenAfrica and African America that seek to suture corollary, asymptoticallydivergent ruptures—maternal estrangement and the thwarted romanceof the sexes—that he refers to as “wounded kinship” and the “the sex-ual ‘cut.’”7 This assertion marks an engagement with a more attenuated,more internally determined, exteriority and a courtship with an alwaysalready unavailable and substitutive origin. It would work by way of animaginative restoration of the Wgure of the mother to a realm deter-mined not only by verbal meaning and conventional musical form butby a nostalgic specularity and a necessarily endogamous, simultaneously


virginal and reproductive sexuality. These twin impulses animate a force-ful operation in Douglass’s work, something like a revaluation of thatrevaluation of value that was set in motion by four of Douglass’s “con-temporaries”—Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Saussure. Above all, theyopen the possibility of a critique of the valuation of meaning over con-tent and the reduction of phonic matter and syntactic “degeneracy” inthe early modern search for a universal language and the late modernsearch for a universal science of language. This disruption of the En-lightenment linguistic project is of fundamental importance since itallows a rearrangement of the relationship between notions of humanfreedom and notions of human essence. More speciWcally, the emer-gence from political, economic, and sexual objection of the radicalmateriality and syntax that animates black performances indicates afreedom drive that is expressed always and everywhere throughout theirgraphic (re)production.

In Caribbean Discourse Edouard Glissant writes:

From the outset (that is from the moment Creole is forged as a medium

of communication between slave and master), the spoken imposes on

the slave its particular syntax. For Caribbean man, the word is Wrst and

foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech. Din is discourse. . . . Since

speech was forbidden, slaves camouXaged the word under the provocative

intensity of the scream. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild

animal. This is how the dispossessed man organized his speech by weav-

ing it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise.8

Lingering with Glissant’s formulations produces certain insights. TheWrst is that the temporal condensation and acceleration of the trajectoryof black performances, which is to say black history, is a real problemand a real chance for the philosophy of history. The second is that theanimative materiality—the aesthetic, political, sexual, and racial force—of the ensemble of objects that we might call black performances, blackhistory, blackness, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy


of human being (which would necessarily bear and be irreducible towhat is called, or what somebody might hope someday to call, subjec-tivity). One of the implications of blackness, if it is set to work in andon such philosophy, is that those manifestations of the future in thedegraded present that C. L. R. James described can never be understoodsimply as illusory. The knowledge of the future in the present is boundup with what is given in something Marx could only subjunctivelyimagine: the commodity who speaks. Here is the relevant passage fromvolume 1 of Capital, at the end of the chapter on “The Commodity,” atthe end of the section called “The Fetishism of the Commodity and ItsSecret.”

But, to avoid anticipating, we will content ourselves here with one more

example relating to the commodity-form itself. If commodities could

speak they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does

not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however,

is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate

to each other merely as exchange-values. Now listen how those com-

modities speak through the mouth of the economist:

“Value (i.e., exchange-value) is a property of things, riches (i.e., use-

value) of man. Value in this sense necessarily implies exchanges, riches

do not.”

“Riches (use-value) are the attribute of man, value is the attribute

of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is

valuable. . . . A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or diamond.”

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a

pearl or a diamond. The economists who have discovered this chemical

substance, and who lay special claim to critical acumen, nevertheless Wnd

that the use-value of material objects belongs to them independently of

their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a

part of them as objects. What conWrms them in this view is the peculiar

circumstance that the use-value of a thing is realized without exchange,

i.e. in a social process. Who would not call to mind at this point the advice

given by the good Dogberry to the night-watchman Seacoal?


“To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and

writing comes by nature.”9

The difWculty of this passage is partly due to its dual ventriloquizations.Marx produces a discourse of his own to put into the mouth of dumbcommodities before he reproduces what he Wgures as the impossiblespeech of commodities magically given through the mouths of classicaleconomists. The difWculty of the passage is intensiWed when Marx goeson to critique both instances of imagined speech. These instances con-tradict one another but Marx comes down neither on the side of speechhe produces nor on that of the speech of classical economists that hereproduces. Instead he traverses what he conceives of as the empty spacebetween these formulations, that space being the impossible materialsubstance of the commodity’s impossible speech. In this regard, what isat stake is not what the commodity says but that the commodity saysor, more properly, that the commodity, in its inability to say, must bemade to say. It is, more precisely, the idea of the commodity’s speechthat Marx critiques, and this is because he believes neither in the factnor in the possibility of such speech. Nevertheless, this critique of theidea of the commodity’s speech only becomes operative by way of adeconstruction of the speciWc meaning of those impossible or unrealpropositions imposed upon the commodity from outside.

The words Marx puts into the commodity’s mouth are these: “ouruse value . . . does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to usas objects, however, is our value,” where value equals exchange value.Marx has the commodity go on to assert that commodities only relateto one another as exchange-values, that this is proven by the necessar-ily social intercourse in which commodities might be said to discoverthemselves. Therefore, the commodity discovers herself, comes to knowherself, only as a function of having been exchanged, having beenembedded in a mode of sociality that is shaped by exchange.

The words of the commodity that are spoken through the mouthsof the classical economists are roughly these: riches (i.e., use-value) areindependent of the materiality of objects, but value, which is to say


exchange-value, is a material part of the object. “A man or a commodityis rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable.” This is because a pearl or a dia-mond is exchangeable. Though he agrees with the classical economistswhen they assert that value necessarily implies exchange, Marx chafes atthe notion that value is an inherent part of the object. “No chemist,” heargues, “has discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.”For Marx, this chemical substance called exchange-value has not beenfound because it does not exist. More precisely, Marx facetiously placesthis discovery in an unachievable future without having considered theconditions under which such a discovery might be made. Those con-ditions are precisely the fact of the commodity’s speech, which Marxdismisses in his critique of the very idea. “So far no chemist has ever dis-covered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond” because pearls ordiamonds have not been heard to speak. The impossible chemical sub-stance of the object’s (exchange-)value is the fact—the material, graphic,phonic substance—of the object’s speech. Speech will have been the cut-ting augmentation of the already existing chemistry of objects, but theobject’s speech, the commodity’s speech, is impossible, that impossibil-ity being the Wnal refutation of whatever the commodity will have said.

Marx argues that the classical economists believe “that the use-value of material objects belongs to them independently of their mate-rial properties.” He further asserts that they are conWned in this viewby the nonsocial realization of use-value—the fact that its realizationdoes not come by way of exchange. When he makes these assertions,Marx moves in an already well-established choreography of approachand withdrawal from a possibility of discovery that Douglass alreadyrecited: the (exchange-)value of the speaking commodity exists also, asit were, before exchange. Moreover, it exists precisely as the capacity forexchange and the capacity for a literary, performative, phonographicdisruption of the protocols of exchange. This dual possibility comes bya nature that is and at the same time is social and historical, a nature thatis given as a kind of anticipatory sociality and historicity.

To think the possibility of an (exchange-)value that is prior toexchange, and to think the reproductive and incantatory assertion of


that possibility as the objection to exchange that is exchange’s conditionof possibility, is to put oneself in the way of an ongoing line of discovery,of coming upon, of invention. The discovery of the chemical substancethat is produced in and by Marx’s counterfactual is the achievement ofDouglass’s line given in and as the theory and practice of everyday lifewhere the spectacular and the mundane encounter one another all thetime. It is an achievement we’ll see given in the primal scene of AuntHester’s objection to exchange, an achievement given in speech, literaryphonography, and their disruption. What is sounded through Douglassis a theory of value—an objective and objectional, productive and repro-ductive ontology—whose primitive axiom is that commodities speak.

The impossible example is given in order to avoid anticipation,but it works to establish the impossibility of such avoidance. Indeed, theexample, in her reality, in the materiality of her speech as breath andsound, anticipates Marx. This sound was already a recording, just as ouraccess to it is made possible only by way of recordings. We move withina series of phonographic anticipations, encrypted messages, sent andsending on frequencies Marx tunes to accidentally, for effect, withoutthe necessary preparation. However, this absence of preparation orforesight in Marx—an anticipatory refusal to anticipate, an obversive oranti- and anteimprovisation—is condition of possibility of a richly aug-mented encounter with the chain of messages the (re)sounding speechof the commodity cuts and carries. The intensity and density of whatcould be thought here as his alternative modes of preparation make pos-sible a whole other experience of the music of the event of the object’sspeech. Moving, then, in the critical remixing of nonconvergent tracks,modes of preparation, traditions, we can think how the commodity whospeaks, in speaking, in the sound—the inspirited materiality—of thatspeech, constitutes a kind of temporal warp that disrupts and augmentsnot only Marx but the mode of subjectivity that the ultimate object ofhis critique, capital, both allows and disallows. All of this moves towardthe secret Marx revealed by way of the music he subjunctively mutes.Such aurality is, in fact, what Marx called the “sensuous outburst of[our] essential activity.”10 It is a passion wherein “the senses have . . .


become theoreticians in their immediate practice.”11 The commoditywhose speech sounds embodies the critique of value, of private property,of the sign. Such embodiment is also bound to the (critique of ) readingand writing, oft conceived by clowns and intellectuals as the naturalattributes of whoever would hope to be known as human.

In the meantime, every approach to Marx’s example must movethrough the ongoing event that anticipates it, the real event of thecommodity’s speech, itself broken by the irreducible materiality—thebroken and irreducible maternity—of the commodity’s scream. Imaginea recording of the (real) example that anticipates the (impossible) exam-ple; imagine that recording as the graphic reproduction of a scene ofinstruction, one always already cut by its own repression; imagine whatcuts and anticipates Marx, remembering that the object resists, thecommodity shrieks, the audience participates. Then you can say thatMarx is prodigal; that in his very formulations regarding Man’s arrivalat his essence, he has yet to come to himself, to come upon himself, toinvent himself anew. This nonarrival is at least in part an ongoingconcealment internal to a project structured by an attunement to therevealed secret. What remains secret in Marx could be thought as or interms of race or sex or gender, of the differences these terms mark, form,and reify. But we can also say that the unrevealed secret is a recrudes-cence of an already existing notion of the private (or, more properly, ofthe proper) that operates within the constellation of self-possession,capacity, subjectivity, and speech. He can point to but not be commu-nist. What does the dispropriative event have to do with communism?What’s the revolutionary force of the sensuality that emerges from thesonic event Marx subjunctively produces without sensually discovering?To ask this is to think what’s at stake in the music: the universaliza-tion or socialization of the surplus, the generative force of a venerablephonic propulsion, the ontological and historical priority of resistanceto power and objection to subjection, the old-new thing, the freedomdrive that animates black performances. This is all meant to begin somethinking of the possibility that the Marxian formulation of sociality-in-exchange is grounded in a notion of the proper that is disrupted by theessential impropriety of the (exchange-)value that precedes exchange.


Part of the project this drive animates is the improvisation throughthe opposition of spirit and matter that is instantiated when the object,the commodity, sounds. Marx’s counterfactual (“If the commodity couldspeak, it would say . . .”) is broken by a commodity and by the trace ofa subjectivity structure born in objection that he neither realizes noranticipates. There is something more here than alienation and fetishiza-tion that works, with regard to Marx, as a preWgurative critique. How-ever, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, and in extension of Marx’sanalytic, the value of the sign is arbitrary, conventional, differential,neither intrinsic nor iconic, not reducible to but rather only discerniblein the reduction of phonic substance.

In any case, it is impossible that sound, as a material element, should in

itself be part of the language. Sound is merely something ancillary, a

material the language uses. All conventional values have the characteris-

tic of being distinct from the tangible element which serves as their vehi-

cle. It is not the metal in a coin which determines its value. A crown piece

nominally worth Wve francs contains only half that sum in silver. Its value

varies somewhat according to the efWgy it bears. It is worth rather more

or rather less on different sides of a political frontier. Considerations of

the same order are even more pertinent to linguistic signals. Linguistic

signals are not in essence phonetic. They are not physical in any way.

They are constituted solely by differences which distinguish one such

sound pattern from another.12

The value of the sign, its necessary relation to the possibility of (auniversal science of and a universal) language, is only given in theabsence or supercession of, or the abstraction from, sounded speech—its essential materiality is rendered ancillary by the crossing of an im-material border or by a differentializing inscription. Similarly, the truthabout the value of the commodity is tied precisely to the impossibil-ity of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it would haveintrinsic value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain valuegiven not from the outside, and would, therefore, contradict the thesison value—that it is not intrinsic—that Marx assigns it. The speaking


commodity thus cuts Marx; but the shrieking commodity cuts Saussure,thereby cutting Marx doubly: this by way of an irruption of phonic sub-stance that cuts and augments meaning with a phonographic, remateri-alizing inscription. That irruption breaks down the distinction betweenwhat is intrinsic and what is given by or of the outside; here what isgiven inside is that which is out-from-the-outside, a spirit manifest inits material expense or aspiration. For Saussure such speech is degraded,say, by accent, a deuniversalizing, material difference; for Chomsky it isdegraded by a deuniversalizing agrammaticality, but Glissant knows that“the [scarred] spoken imposes on the slave its particular syntax.” Thesematerial degradations—Wssures or invaginations of a foreclosed univer-sality, a heroic but bounded eroticism—are black performances. Thereoccurs in such performances a revaluation or reconstruction of value,one disruptive of the oppositions of speech and writing, and spirit andmatter. It moves by way of the (phono-photo-porno-)graphic disruptionthe shriek carries out. This movement cuts and augments the primal.If we return again and again to a certain passion, a passionate responseto passionate utterance, horn-voice-horn over percussion, a protest, anobjection, it is because it is more than another violent scene of subjectiontoo terrible to pass on; it is the ongoing performance, the preWgurativescene of a (re)appropriation—the deconstruction and reconstruction,the improvisational recording and revaluation—of value, of the theoryof value, of the theories of value.13 It’s the ongoing event of an antioriginand an anteorigin, replay and reverb of an impossible natal occasion, theperformance of the birth and rebirth of a new science, a phylogeneticfantasy that (dis)establishes genesis, the reproduction of blackness inand as (the) reproduction of black performance(s). It’s the offset and re-write, the phonic irruption and rewind, of my last letter, my last recorddate, my Wrst winter, casting of effect and affect in the widest possibleangle of dispersion.

It is important to emphasize that the object’s resistance is, amongother things, a rupture of two circles, the familial and the hermeneutic.The protocols of this investigation demand the consideration of that


resistance as we’ll see Douglass both describe and transmit it. More pre-cisely, we must be attuned to the transmission of the very materialitythat is being described while noting the relay between material phonog-raphy and material substitution.

Impossible, substitutive motherhood is the location of AuntHester, a location discovered, if not produced, in Hortense Spillers’simprovisational audition of sighting, non-sight, seen; of the heretoforeunheard and overlooked (overseen) at the heart of the spectacle. Spillersexplains what Douglass brings in his preWgurative disruption of andirruption into a fraternal science of value that emerges in a “social cli-mate” in which motherhood is not perceived “as a legitimate procedureof cultural inheritance”:

The African-American male has been touched, therefore, by the

mother, handled by her in ways that he cannot escape, and in ways that

the white American male is allowed to temporize by a fatherly reprieve.

This human and historical development—the text that has been inscribed

on the benighted heart of the continent—takes us to the center of an

inexorable difference in the depths of American women’s community: the

African-American woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically

the powerful and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evapo-

rated—the law of the Mother—only and precisely because legal enslave-

ment removed the African-American male not so much from sight as

from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social Wction of the

Father’s name, the Father’s law.

Therefore, the female, in this order of things, breaks in upon the

imagination with a forcefulness that marks both a denial and an “illegit-

imacy.” Because of this peculiar American denial, the black American

male embodies the only American community of males which has had the

speciWc occasion to learn who the female is within itself, the infant child

who bears the life against the could-be fateful gamble, against the odds

of pulverization and murder, including her own. It is the heritage of the

mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his

own personhood—the “power” of “yes” to the “female” within.14


Listen to the echo of Douglass’s performative reproduction of a perfor-mance inextricably bound to his attempts to repress the learning thatSpillers describes. But note that this attenuated covering of the mater-nal mark in Douglass is itself part and parcel of a kind of counterin-scription before the fact, a preWgurative rematerialization constitutiveof his recitation that returns as an expansive, audiovisual discourse onmusic. Meanwhile, note the indistinctness of the conditions of “mother”and “enslavement” in the milieu from which Douglass emerges andwhich he describes and narrates. This is to say that enslavement—andthe resistance to enslavement that is the performative essence of black-ness (or, perhaps less controversially, the essence of black performance)is a being maternal that is indistinguishable from a being material. But itis also to say something more. And here, the issue of reproduction (the“natural” production of natural children) emerges right on time as ithas to do not only with the question concerning slavery, blackness, per-formance, and the ensemble of their ontologies but also with a contra-diction at the heart of the question of value in its relation to personhoodthat could be said to come into clearer focus against the backdrop of theensemble of motherhood, blackness, and the bridge between slavery andfreedom.

Leopoldina Fortunati puts it this way: “The conXicting presenceof value and nonvalue contained within individuals themselves obviouslycreates a speciWc and unresolvable contradiction.”15 She is speaking ofa certain dematerialization that marks the transition from precapitalistto capitalist production and that works analogously to a dematerializ-ing operation animating the movement from slave labor to “free” labor.These transitions are both characterized by

the commodity, [as] exchange value, taking precedence over the-individual-

as-use-value, despite the fact that the individual is still the only source

of the creation of value. For it is only by re-deWning the individual as

non-value, or rather as pure use-value, that capital can succeed in creat-

ing labor power as “a commodity,” i.e. an exchange value. But the “value-

lessness” of free workers is not only a consequence of the new mode


of production, it is also one of the preconditions, since capital cannot

become a social relation other than in relation to the individuals who,

divested of all value, are thus forced to sell the only commodity they have,

their labor power.

Secondly, under capitalism, reproduction is separated off from produc-

tion; the former unity that existed between the production of use-values

and the reproduction of individuals within precapitalist modes of pro-

duction has disappeared, and now the general process of commodity

production appears as being separated from, and even in direct opposi-

tion to, the process of reproduction. While the Wrst appears as the creation

of value, the second, reproduction, appears as the creation of non-value.

Commodity production is thus posited as the fundamental point of

capitalist production, and the laws that govern it as the laws that charac-

terize capitalism itself. Reproduction now becomes posited as “natural”

production.16

Fortunati joins Marx in a minute but crucial declension from use-value to nonvalue. The individual, enslaved laborer is characterized asuse-value that, in the Weld of capitalist production, is equivalent tono-value, which is to say operative outside of exchange. But if this theo-retical placement of the enslaved laborer outside of the Weld of exchangepositions her as noncommodity, it does so not by way of some rigorousaccounting but rather as a function of not hearing, of overlooking. Thisis despite the inescapable fact of the trafWc in slaves. And becauseneither Marx nor Fortunati is able fully to think the articulation of slaveand commodity, they both underestimate the commodity’s powers, forinstance, the power to speak and to break speech. And yet, Fortunati,in her analysis of reproduction and in her submission of Marxian cate-gories to the corrective of feminist theory, sees, along with and aheadof Marx, that the individual contains value and nonvalue, that thecommodity is contained within the individual. This presence of thecommodity within the individual is an effect of reproduction, a traceof maternity. Of equal importance is the containment of a certain per-sonhood within the commodity that can be seen as the commodity’s


animation by the material trace of the maternal—a palpable hit ortouch, a bodily and visible phonographic inscription. In the end, whatI’m interested in is precisely that transference, a carrying or crossingover, that takes place on the bridge of lost matter, lost maternity, lostmechanics that joins bondage and freedom, that interinanimates thebody and its ephemeral if productive force, that interarticulates the per-formance and the reproductive reproduction it always already containsand which contains it. This interest is, in turn, not in the interest of anostalgic and impossible suturing of wounded kinship but is ratherdirected toward what this irrepressibly inscriptive, reproductive, andresistant material objecthood does for and might still do to the exclu-sionary brotherhoods of criticism and black radicalism as experimentalblack performance. This is to say that this book is an attempt to describethe material reproductivity of black performance and to claim for thisreproductivity the status of an ontological condition. This is the storyof how apparent nonvalue functions as a creator of value; it is also thestory of how value animates what appears as nonvalue. This function-ing and this animation are material. This animateriality—impassionedresponse to passionate utterance—is painfully and hiddenly disclosedalways and everywhere in the tracks of black performance and blackdiscourse on black performance. It is both for and before Marx in waysdelineated by Cedric Robinson’s historical analysis of “the making ofthe black radical tradition.” This book is meant to contribute both tothe aesthetic genealogy of that line and to the invagination of the onto-logical totality whose preservation, according to Robinson, inspires atradition whose birth is characterized by an ancient pre-maturity.17

Here, then, is one such disclosure, famously and infamously made byFrederick Douglass in his 1845 Narrative. By way of a set of resonantnodal points along the massive trajectory it extends, I want to thinkabout this disclosure as an unavoidable anticipation, the preWgurativeresponse to an epochal counterfactual, the always already belated originof the music that ought to be understood as the rigorously sounded cri-tique of the theory of value.


I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending

shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and

whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No

words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron

heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he

whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped the longest.

He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush;

and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-

clotted cowskin. I remember the Wrst time I ever witnessed this horrible

exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I shall never forget

it whilst I remember anything. It was the Wrst of a long series of such out-

rages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck

me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the

hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terri-

ble spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I

beheld it. . . .

Aunt Hester had not only disobeyed his orders in going out, but

had been found in company with Lloyd’s Ned; which circumstance, I

found, from what he said while whipping her, was the chief offense. Had

he been a man of pure morals himself, he might have been thought inter-

ested in protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those who know him

will not suspect him of any such virtue. Before he commenced whipping

Aunt Hester he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to

waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back entirely naked. He then told

her to cross her hands, calling her at the same time a d——d b——h.

After crossing her hands, he tied them with strong rope, and led her to

a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in for the purpose. He made

her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook. She now stood fair

for the infernal purpose. Her arms were stretched up at their full length,

so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said to her, “Now,

you d——d b——h, I’ll learn you how to disobey my orders!” and after

rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and

soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and

horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the Xoor. I was so terriWed


and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared

not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected

it would be my turn next. It was all new to me. I had never seen anything

like it before. . . .18

Now consider that passage’s relation to an almost equally well-knownone that closely follows it:

The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly

allowance for themselves and their fellow slaves, were peculiarly enthusi-

astic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles

around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest

joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went

along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came

out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as

in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment

in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the

most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to weave

something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this, when

leaving home. They would sing most exultingly the following words:—

“I am going away to the Great House Farm!

Oh, yea! O, yea! O!”

This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem

unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to them-

selves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs

would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of

slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject

could do.

I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude

and incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw

nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe

which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were


tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of

souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony

against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The

hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and Wlled me with

ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing

them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afXicts me; and

while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found

its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my Wrst glimmering con-

ception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of

that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of

slavery, and quicken my sympathy for my brethren in bonds. If any one

wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go

to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the

deep pine woods, and there let him in silence analyze the sounds that shall

pass through the chambers of his soul;—and if he is not impressed, it will

only be because “there is no Xesh in his obdurate heart.”19

What does it mean to move in the tradition of these passages, a tradi-tion of devotion both to the happy and the tragic possibilities embed-ded in passionate utterance and response? Passionate utterance andresponse together take the form of an encounter, the mutual, negativepositioning of master and slave. This encounter is appositional, isshaped by a step away that calls such positions radically into question.In this sense utterance and response, seen together as encounter, form akind of call wherein Hester’s shrieks improvise both speech and writing.What they echo and initiate in their response to the oaths—that mustbe heard as the passionate utterance or call—of the master helps toconstitute a questioning, musical encounter.

Having been called by call and response back to music, let’s prepareour descent: let the call of call and response, passionate utterance andresponse—articulated in the scene Douglass identiWes as “the blood-stained gate” through which he entered into subjection and subjectiv-ity; articulated, more precisely, in the phonography of the very screamsthat open the way into the knowledge of slavery and the knowledge of


freedom—operate as a kind of anacrusis (a note or beat or musickedword improvised through the opposition of speech and writing beforethe deWnition of rhythm and melody). Gerard Manley Hopkins’s termfor anacrusis was encountering. Let the articulation of appositionalencounter be our encountering: a nondetermining invitation to the newand continually unprecedented performative, historical, philosophical,democratic, communist arrangements that are the only authentic ones.

In the long advent of a movement called “free jazz”—a beginningas long as the tradition it extends—Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, andOscar Brown Jr. collaborated in making a recording/performance called“Protest.” Lincoln hums and then screams over Roach’s increasinglyand insistently intense percussion, moving inexorably in a trajectory andtoward a location that is remote from—if not in excess of or inaccessibleto—words. You cannot help but hear the echo of Aunt Hester’s screamas it bears, at the moment of articulation, a sexual overtone, an invagi-nation constantly reconstituting the whole of the voice, the whole ofthe story, redoubled and intensiWed by the mediation of years, recita-tions, auditions. That echo haunts, say, Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” or thefractured, fracturing climax of James Brown’s “Cold Sweat.” It’s there-en-gendering haint of an old negation: Ayler always screamingsecretly to the very idea of mastery, “It’s not about you”; Brown payingthe price of such negation, a terrible, ecstatic, possessive, dispossessiveinability to stop singing; both performing historical placement as a longtransfer, a transcendental fade, an interminable songlike drag disruptingsong. The revolution embedded in such duration is, for a moment, a runof questions: What is the edge of this event? What am I, the object?What is the music? What is manhood? What is the feminine? What isthe beautiful? What will blackness be?20

Where shriek turns speech turns song—remote from the impos-sible comfort of origin—lies the trace of our descent. That place—locus of an ongoingly other recording of event, object, music—is AbbeyLincoln’s narrative. This is a recording, an improvisation, of her words,troubled by the trace of the performance of which she tells and theperformance of which that performance told.


I was born the tenth of twelve children . . . /I visited a psychiatric hospi-

tal ’cause Roach said there was madness in the house. He said it wasn’t

him, so I Wgured it must be me/They had me hollering and screaming like

a crazy person; I ain’t hollering and screaming for my freedom. The

women I come from will take something and knock you . . . /Monk whis-

pered in my ear, “Don’t be so perfect.” He meant make a mistake; reach

for something/I didn’t think a scream was part of the music/We were rid-

ing in the car with my nephew who was eight years old and who said,

“The reason I can scream louder than Aunt Abbey is ’cause I’m a little

boy/Went all over the world hollering and screaming; it increased my

depth as an actress and a singer/I didn’t write it, I didn’t conceive it; I’m

just the singer on it/I got rid of a taboo and screamed in everybody’s

face/We had to go to court; somebody thought Roach was killing me in

the studio/My instrument is deepening and widening; it’s because I’m

possessed of the spirit /I learned it from my mother—the preacher, that’s

what they called her/Betty Carter: we came to the stage about the same

time; it was a great surprise when she died; she was a year older than

me and I’ve been feeling frail ever since . . . It’s easy for me to cry; I’m an

actress/You gotta sing a song; you can’t sing jazz/When Bird was around

he knew he wasn’t playing jazz. He was playing his spirit. And I think

that’s the problem for a lot of the musicians on the scene now. They think

that they’re playing jazz. But there’s no such thing, really/I’m possessed

of my own spirit/This is the music of the African muse/I just want to be

of use to my ancestors/It’s holy work and it’s dangerous not to know that

’cause you could die like an animal down here.21

Lincoln demands another rethinking, of “Protest” along lines I onlythought I knew, lines I never thought I knew. Her relation to Roachdisturbingly and rightly echoes Hester’s relation to the master and toDouglass. Roach’s double identiWcation and desire link him to Douglassand are all bound up with Lincoln’s political, musical, and intellectuallingering in a quite speciWc and brutal kind of horror as Roach’s object,accessing and performing, recording, that history, moving in the double-ness of possession, the sexuality of spirituality and the anoriginality ofblack performances. Not the reduction of but the reduction to phonic


materiality where re-en-gendering prefaces and works itself. No origi-nary conWguration of attributes but an ongoing shiftiness, a living laborof engendering to be organized in its relation to a politico-aesthesis. It’salways going on and has been. Abbey Lincoln starts, in classic (anti-,ante-[slave]) narrative fashion. That black radicalism cannot be under-stood within the particular context of its genesis is true; it cannot beunderstood outside that context either. In this sense, black radicalismis (like) black music. The broken circle demands a new analytic (way oflistening to the music). So we move with but also out and outside ofDouglass’s repressive, annular attunement to the secret, the audio-visualmateriality of a maternal substitution, identiWcation, and cathexis thathe tries to forget, the ongoing re-entry into a vexed self-knowledgethat he covers by entering into a discourse on music. Douglass (and, byextension, Roach and Brown and the entire line of mastery’s disruptive,oppositional, anoriginal recording) was already sexually cut and aug-mented, already anticipated and improvised, already re-en-gendered bythe sound of the one who comes before him, the one we keep callingon to arrive again, here and now, so we can get to the content of theepigraph.


Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love

The title comes from a Mingus composition and brings a scene to mind,a triptych, a set of questions concerning the content—the weight andenergy in and of sound—of Ellington’s life and love, Ellington’s eros,(the Ellington) ensemble.

This is about the politics of the erotic and the erotics of sound inEllington’s music, remembering with Ellington’s most radically devotedfollower, Cecil Taylor, that anything is music as long as you apply cer-tain principles of organization to it. Eros in Ellington is not but nothingother than sexual, moving along lines that Freud lays out in his theory ofthe drives. This doesn’t sanction any strict Freudian analysis of Elling-ton because Ellingtonian meaning swings in a way that Freud probablycan’t quite reach. But in this swing there’s something that Freud mighthelp to illuminate even as whatever light he sheds is cut and augmented,if not eclipsed, by Ellington’s sound. What drives Ellington? How doesdrive function in Ellington? Swing is given only after the fact of thecontent—again, the weight and energy in and of sound—of Ellington’sdrive, which is to say his love. For Freud, eros, life, love, is the drive “toestablish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus.”1 This notionof Freud’s gives you something to work with in an attempt to appreci-ate Ellington, to understand at least part of what was contained in whatwas, for him, the greatest possible compliment: “beyond category.”

C H A P T E R 1

The Sentimental Avant-Garde

25

See, black performance has always been the ongoing improvisa-tion of a kind of lyricism of the surplus—invagination, rupture, colli-sion, augmentation. This surplus lyricism—think here of the muted,mutating horns of Tricky Sam Nanton or Cootie Williams—is what alot of people are after when they invoke the art and culture—the radi-cal (both rooted and out there, immanent and transcendent) sensual-ity—of and for my people. It’s a lyricism that Marx was trying to getto when he envisioned theoretical senses. It’s what that which is calledthe avant-garde desires whether it accepts or rejects that name. ThisinXuence of my people to which Ellington refers, in what it hopes for (agenuinely new universal) and in what it disrupts (that which has here-tofore been given as the universal) is the sound of love. But this drive ofand for “my people”—who are, for Ellington and according to Ellington,“the people”—is complicated; it continually erupts out of its own cate-gorization like a Cat Anderson hyperclimax.2 Such blackness is only inthat it exceeds itself; it bears the groundedness of an uncontainableoutside. It’s an erotics of the cut, submerged in the broken, breakingspace-time of an improvisation. Blurred, dying life; liberatory, impro-visatory, damaged love; freedom drive.

A transcriptive, descriptive triptych from Terry Carter’s Wlm A DukeNamed Ellington:

The voice of Julian Bond attempts to put forward an understanding of whatEllington might have meant by “beyond category,” particularly the categoriesof identity. The voice-over manifests some of the pitfalls of analytic interpretationand in so doing reveals at least some of what’s problematic in constant invoca-tions of Ellingtonian elegance and, especially, Ellingtonian universality—mainlythe avoidance of what is most truly, deeply, elegantly, and radically universal inEllington’s work. Bond takes Ellington’s wonderful performance of the responseto one of those questions that so often makes you cringe when you watch sixtiesdocumentaries on black folks as a kind of evasion of a particular—most proba-bly racial—identity. But the drive for ever greater unities in Ellington is notanimated by the desire for some empty and colorless universality. The cascading

26 – THE SENTIMENTAL AVANT-GARDE

and augmentative whole that Ellington constantly achieves, breaks, and exceedsin and with his band, his instrument, is a black whole, a black, brown, and beigewhole, even as it is also that which both is and contains “the group of those whoadmire Beaujolais, those who aspire to produce something Wt for the plateau,those who aspire to be dilettantes.” More to the point, the beautiful, musicalinterplay between my people and the people, prefaced by Ellington’s jabbing,caressingly disruptive accompaniment of his own utterance, gets at somethingway more than the appeal to a universality that, in its lack of particularity,could never be a universality at all.

If you thought Ellington’s bent response to the call of a question that would seemto oppose blackness and universality straightens out into some simple afWrma-tion of a simple whole, Herb Jeffries, famous not only as a vocalist in Elling-ton’s band but as the Saturday morning movie serial black cowboy, the BronzeBuckaroo, gives you a clue. “Duke was only after your conWdence,” communi-cating, arranging his orchestra that is you. He’s choreographing, writing adance with his utterance and conveying a desire for some movement that isdivergent and in unison, a position that envelops and breathes.

Like Ellington arranged at the piano surrounded by his instrument as theyplayed without—which is to say outside—music, their arrangement signifying(their knowledge of the) arrangement: Ellington would sing the parts, forgingthe preparation of the music beside writing, the orchestra’s change of motion dri-ven, given, proportional to his motive force or drive. That drive, again, is love.

Where’s swing come from? What drive? My People: the rhythm ofthis performance, a resistance to the question that is erotic. Yet he wasblack, he did have and was in a band, inside the band that invaginativelyenvelops him, his comping marking that rhythmic disruption that ani-mates swing, out of which swing emerges, before meaning. Is the free-dom drive conservative? Is there some Aristophanean return to a priorunity? Is that which is before swing also before eros, that drive “toestablish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus” to whichcannot be applied the formula that has the drives tend “towards a return

THE SENTIMENTAL AVANT-GARDE – 27

to an earlier state”?3 Since that origin must have been a prior unity, erosis Wgured as the drive whose origin is unavailable. At the same time thepositing and the fact of eros is unavoidable since it necessarily works intandem with its other, the destroyer of connections and undoer of things,whose Wnal aim is to lead things into an inorganic state, toward a return,therefore, to death, which is, for Freud, Wgured as an available originwhere origin can only be Wgured as inanimate and fragmented (which isto say that, for Freud, the inanimate precedes the animate logically).

All this, too, so that we can understand the drives as working intandem, against, or with each other across the cut of a ruptured andim/possible origin. “The sexual act is an act of aggression with the pur-pose of the most intimate union. This concurrent and mutually oppos-ing action of the two basic drives gives rise to the whole variegation ofthe phenomena of life.”4 Yes, but the problem is that we here neitheradmit to an originary unity (given the necessary logical impossibility ofthe logically necessary return) nor justify an originary difference (ifevery drive—including eros—must instantiate a return to an originarystate). What justiWes eros’s breaking of the law of the necessary returnof the drives to their originary state?

Freud puts forward an asymmetrical, syncopated, off notion of theduality of the basic drives where each is reducible to the other’s originand one is irreducible to its own. And yet, he says, “ModiWcations in theproportions of the fusion between the drives have the most tangibleresults. A surplus of sexual aggressiveness will turn a lover into a sex-murderer, while a sharp diminution in the aggressive factor will makehim bashful or impotent.”5 He seems, then, to require a kind of balancein a structure that is originarily asymmetrical, where there seems to bean originary surplus located at the site of the unlocatable origin of eros,the anteoriginary or, as Andrew Benjamin might put it, “anoriginal”drive.6 This asymmetrical, difference producing, anoriginal differenceor différance of the drives is, however, further complicated by the fact ofa spatial indivisibility of the drives that would seem to imply some orig-inary unity—or, more precisely, an originary erotics—where the idea oforiginary unity had already been rendered impossible as a function of


the impossibility of a return to originary unity in its coupling with thelaw of the necessary return to origin of the drives. Freud must picturean initial state of eros and that state can tolerate nothing prior to iteven though it is a law of the drives that they must tend toward some-thing prior, that the drives cannot be spoken of in terms of their initialstate. (This is the reason the death drive spawns no term analogous to“libido”;7 and now we understand eros as breaking two fundamental lawsof the drives: it cannot be thought in terms of the necessary return toan original state, on the one hand, and it must be thought in terms ofa certain reducibility to an initial state, on the other. Now you’ve gotto try to see the massive, asymptotic difference, the miniscule andunbridgeable distance, between the originary and the initial.) (And yetthis spatial indivisibility is almost immediately undermined by thenotion of the ego as “the great reservoir” of the libido.8 How is this tobe reconciled to the omnipresence of the drives? Perhaps by way of anunderstanding of a difference between the drive and energy that is of thesame problematic structure as that between the origin and the initial.)

There can be no question of restricting one or the other of the basic

drives to one of the provinces of the mind. They must necessarily be met

with everywhere. We may picture an initial state as one in which the total

available energy of Eros, which henceforward we will speak of as “libido,”

is present in the still undifferentiated ego-id and serves to neutralize the

destructive tendencies which are simultaneously present. (We are without

a term analogous to ‘libido’ for describing the energy of the destructive

instinct.)9

In An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, Freud’s exposition of the theory of thedrives turns from eros to libido, which he takes to be the initial stanceand energy of eros. And, for Freud, the libido emerges from the body.He says:

There can be no question but that the libido has somatic sources, that it

streams to the ego from various organs and parts of the body. This is most


clearly seen in the case of that portion of the libido which, from its

instinctual aim, is described as sexual excitation. The most prominent

of the parts of the body from which this libido arises are known by the

name of “erotogenic zones,” though in fact the whole body is an erotogenic

zone of this kind. The greater part of what we know about Eros—that is

to say, about its exponent, the libido—has been gained from the study of

the sexual function, which, indeed, on the prevailing view, even if not

according to our theory, coincides with Eros. We have been able to form

a picture of the way in which the sexual urge, which is destined to exer-

cise a decisive inXuence on our life, gradually develops out of successive

contributions from a number of component instincts, which represent

particular erotogenic zones.10

Between origin and initiality, drive and energy, lies the “sexual ‘cut.’”Eros. Event. Forgive the perversity of my insistence that Freud’s com-pression and exposition, which is to say not only the form but the con-tent of that exposition, is a wonderful piece of Ellingtonia. The densityof the miniatures that make up the suite we call An Outline of Psycho-Analysis is rich with the necessity and effect of forming pictures in theterrain in which there can be no question. This is the dense erotics ofarrangement, the whole of the text working like the whole of the bodyworking like the whole of the orchestra—a miraculously autoexpansive,invaginative, erotogenic zone. The sexual urge of the text, like Elling-ton’s music, like Ellington’s sound of love, develops out of successivecontributions, out of the asymmetrical differences of individual players,pictures, metaphors that are also sounds and bodies—particular eroto-genic zones. But if Ellington moves out of Mackey’s “insistent previ-ousness evading each and every natal occasion,” Freud operates afterthe fact of a locatable natality before which there is nothing. What doesthe sexual cut do to the primal scene? What does it do to the drivestructure? What does the drive structure do to it? What I’m really try-ing to say is this: Ellington’s music reconWgures the context in whicheverything, which is to say music, is read (+ = more). His sound of loveinfuses rooms, ruptures walls and hallways, collides with the friezes


and carved-out names in library facades, building ever greater unities,making his band (featuring special ghost soloists Sigmund Freud andKarl Marx) swing with the force of a new, another, content, the ensem-blic, improvisational nature of this sound of love, the human animalityof its instruments.

Voices/Forces

Here’s the instrument as small band: Beauford Delaney, Antonin Artaud,Billy Strayhorn.

Time became different—not just an hour by the clock but a mysterious

aliveness from the tips of your toes to the top of your head, touching

everything and everyone. This began to be Paris for me. The dilemma of

the human experience never lost its sorrow or joy; it simply had a way of

existing for long periods immune to both, and all as if one was moving

along a musical score to the orchestration of a complete poem of the

emotions, hearing and living the music of the place called Paris.11

Insane asylums are conscious and premeditated receptacles of black magic,

and it is not only that doctors encourage magic with their inopportune

and hybrid therapies,

it is how they use it.12

. . . a week in Paris will ease the bite of it . . .13

The idea of the avant-garde is embedded in a theory of history. This isto say that a particular geographical ideology, a geographical-racial orracist unconscious, marks and is the problematic out of which or againstthe backdrop of which the idea of the avant-garde emerges. The specterof Hegel reigns over and animates this constellation. His haunting,haunted formulations constitute one of the ways racism produces thesocial, aesthetic, political-economic, and theoretical surplus that is theavant-garde. There is a fundamental connection between the (re)pro-duction and performance of the surplus and the avant-garde.14 This


connection is bound to others or operates in a cumulative, rupturalunity with other such connections, the most crucial of which is thatbetween fetishization and the avant-garde or, more precisely, betweencertain reconstructions of the theory of value (more precisely, an irrup-tion of the foundations of the science of value, an epistemological breakand sexual cut that arises in the middle of the nineteenth century asthe codiWcation of aesthetic and political energies that emerge out ofthe speciWc condition of possibility of modernity, namely, Europeancolonialism) and chattel slavery. This relation of fetishization to theavant-garde must be thought with some precision. It must be situatedin relation to a universalization of ritual that rears its head in the invo-cation of roots or of tradition or interculturalism or appropriation, allof which are made possible by the ongoing development of Northernhegemony. Such invocation unsurprisingly occurs in an era impreciselycharacterized as post–cold war (where the nature of the cold war hasnever or only vaguely been thought) or newly globalized (where global-ization is thought, somehow, as other than what it has actually been upto now, “a strategy for maximum exclusion,” as Masao Miyoshi says).This is to say that the conditions necessary for the production of thesurplus remain, that the remainder remains and not only in and as theeffects of reproduction. Precision demands that in the encounter with aseries of graphic reproductions we listen.

What I’ve been speciWcally interested in here is how the idea of a blackavant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically—as if black, on the onehand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coher-ence upon the exclusion of the other. Now this is probably an over-statement of the case. Yet it’s all but justiWed by a vast interdisciplinarytext representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusionthat the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of adeeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avant-garde as neces-sarily not black. Part of what I’m after now is this: an assertion that theavant-garde is a black thing (that, for the sake of argument, RichardSchechner wouldn’t understand) and an assertion that blackness is an


avant-garde thing (that, for the sake of argument, Albert Murraywouldn’t understand).

For Murray, the avant-garde is fundamentally determined by itsexpendability.15 Focusing on the military connotations of the term,Murray understands the avant-garde as continually submitting itself toa sacriWcial experimentalism whose value exists only in what it opens forand echoes of what is essential to the tradition. In his case the traditionis a certain convergence of black cultural expression and a Malrauxvian“museum without walls,” the location of a distilled, cross-cultural, aes-thetic, and political universality that both culminates in and is saved byAmerica, the apotheosis of the West, and blackness, the West’s mosticonic creation. Meanwhile, Schechner invests in a formulation of theend of the avant-garde, one structured by the absence or impossibilityof the new in the face of a technologically induced exhaustion, a malaisebrought on by a general inability to escape the strictures of reproduc-tion, of the fetishization and commodiWcation reproduction fosters.16

And further, in the spirit of contemporary American triumphalismwherein the end of the avant-garde is an effect and echo of the end ofideology, Schechner says, who cares if no other Artaud comes along.One can only imagine that Murray would say amen. I want to thinkabout why it is that we ought to care about the (second or ongoing)coming (upon) of the avant-garde. To do this I need to try to Wll inSchechner’s outline of the historical avant-garde, disturb the borders ofMurray’s conception of blackness, and stage an encounter betweenArtaud and some others that follow and anticipate him.

This requires a trip to Paris. The trip moves by way of Harlemand the Village, by way of the out extension of renaissance. Actually,the trip has an uncountable number of points of embarkation, none ofwhich is originary, and is made on a railroad both aleatory and under-ground. Finally, the destination is also subject to cut and augmentation.This requires a trip through Paris.

This is when Harlem is no longer a point of arrival. This constella-tion is initially marked by a particular black modernist response to


that capital of national cosmopolitanism-in-primitivism, Paris. But thisresponse is itself understood as the echo or recording of other, earliermigrations, arrivals, or (re)births. This mode of response is exempliWedby Delaney and his work, his movement in the multiply sited encounterbetween the European and African diasporas. In Delaney’s case (as inevery other), one site of this encounter (in his case Paris, and the exilicor expatriate movement to it) is always preWgured. Similarly, the nataloccasion such an encounter represents is always anticipated. Paris andthe movement to Paris echoes Greenwich Village and the movement toGreenwich Village, itself the repetition with differences of Harlem,Boston, Knoxville, Tennessee, and on and on, always, Wnally, before evenDelaney himself. In spite of the uncountable instances of such geo-graphic activity, this encounter is most often conceived of as driven byan agency that moves in only one direction. Whereas a powerful strainof postcolonial theory structures itself as the reversal of that directionand its gaze, I’m interested in the discovery of a necessary appositionalityin this encounter, an almost hidden step (to the side and back) or ges-ture, a glance or glancing blow, that is the condition of possibility of agenuine aesthetic representation and analysis—in painting and prose—of that encounter.

Something in Delaney’s Parisian paintings and autobiographicalwritings helps to illuminate the necessary connection between blackpolitical reason, the possibility of a cosmopolitan and/or geopoliticalaesthetic and the rehabilitation of the very idea of the avant-garde. Thisconnection is often and most interestingly made at the site of emer-gence of what he alternatively called voices and forces, the paintedsounds of the thought of the outside, the visual manifestation of phonicsubstance and the content it bears, the disruption of the border betweenwhat could be thought as a debilitating psychic, political, and sexual ill-ness, on the one hand, and—with regard to these same categories—anenabling and invaginative health, on the other. I’m interested in howwhat might be thought as the merely gestural is given as the appositionalforce that manifests itself in Delaney’s paintings and texts as irreduciblephonic substance, vocal exteriority, the extremity that is often unnoticed


as mere accompaniment to (reasoned) utterance. To refer to this exteri-ority, after, say, Artaud, simply as madness is no longer possible. Mad-ness is, rather, that understanding of Artaud that moves outside ofany reference to Delaney, to their mediated, seemingly impossible en-counter. Their encounter is one of space-time separated coincidenceand migrant imagination, channels of natal prematurity as well as blackrebirth, modernism as intranational as well as international relocation,and the politico-aesthetics of a surplus of content irreducible to identityin or for itself, but held, rather, in identity’s relation to a general up-heaval. So that this is about the force that animates and awaits releasefrom texts and canvases that represent the itineraries and locales ofmodernism and modernity.

Is Harlem a privileged place in this chain of renaissance? Onemust consult Billy Strayhorn here. Strayhorn, with a song called “LushLife” among a good bit of other compositions he’d penned in his home-town of Pittsburgh, arrives in Harlem around 1940, roughly a decadeafter Delaney exited the train from Boston there before quickly movingdown to the Village. And though Delaney’s destinations required takingthe A-train in the direction opposite to that which Strayhorn famouslyrecommends, their connection is crucial especially at the site of a cer-tain dream of Paris, even if, for Strayhorn, the dream is only of a week,rather than a more permanent sojourn, in Paris. Of course Delaney andStrayhorn—whose name is so suggestive especially when we hear himsing, the outness or uncontrollability of his voice or horn, itinerant,stray like the brass and winds of Ellington’s (and Strayhorn’s) “instru-ment”—share (according to their biographers) in the outness of their(homo)sexuality and their movements, on the A-train and more widely,as “Lush Life” suggests, what it is to be driven by the paradoxically hid-den extremity and necessary unrequitedness of love.17 They are drivento and by a fugitivity that, according to Nathaniel Mackey, is dis-ruptively essential to the music that Delaney’s paintings will strive torepresent, most especially by way of abstraction, most fundamentallyin what might be called a kind of glossolalian application of paint tothe canvas. One thinks here, too, of a chain of surplus spellings and


christenings (De Laney, Strayhorne) that moved in some space-timeseparated synchrony with that of Artaud, who signed certain letters—like one, for instance, to the doctor who treated him during his longconWnement at the mental institution in Rodez, France, Gaston Ferdière,about whom more in a minute—“Antonin Nalpas,” the Wctional sur-name here being the maiden name of his mother, given as if somehowmore originary, marking something like that Wnal and impossible returnthat Ellington points to in the title of his tribute album for Strayhorn,And His Mother Called Him Bill. Such renaming also marks a propensityto wander or migrate or stray that is always animated by desire. Thinkof James Baldwin, Delaney’s protégé and object of desire, followingDelaney’s move from or through Harlem to the Village as the preWgur-ing of Delaney’s following Baldwin to Paris; or think of those hushedvoices, about which more in a minute, that later, on the road to Istan-bul, in the midst of another tracing of Baldwin’s steps, Delaney willoverhear as he rides in the back seat of a car. Those voices emanate froma car whose path Delaney and some companions crossed somewhere inYugoslavia. The car sped toward the one in which Delaney was ridingand somehow he heard its passengers, always already translated, say,“Look at that little black faggot riding with those two white boys.”18

Gaston Ferdière was Beauford Delaney’s doctor, too. Delaney’s biogra-pher, who is also Baldwin’s biographer, David Leeming, informs us:

On December 20 [1961] Solange du Closel and her husband drove

Beauford to the Nogent clinic where he was placed under the care of the

well-known psychiatrist Dr. Ferdière, whose specialty was depression.

Ferdière quickly conWrmed the diagnosis of acute paranoia and gave

Beauford anti-depressant medicine that stopped the hallucinations. He

warned Beauford that alcohol would negate the beneWts of the treatment.

Ferdière spoke English and had a good knowledge of painting and the

arts—he had treated the mental disorders of the dramatist Antonin

Artaud and had written a book critical of the handling of Vincent Van

Gogh’s depression.19


Delaney, Strayhorn, and Artaud share some transatlantic maternalmachinery (as Artaud might say). Forces. Voices. Leeming records themfor us in his citation of Delaney’s 1961 journals, written, at Ferdière’sprescription, as part of Delaney’s therapy. I want to refer to two passagesfrom that journal and argue for their interconnection. In the Wrst,Delaney recalls his beloved older sister, Ogust Mae, whom he lost whenshe was only nineteen; in the second, Delaney thinks the relationbetween his paintings and black music:

Sister was older than me and we were very close. As we grew older there

were ever increasing needs for money and mama began to go out in ser-

vice cooking, or nursing, or being a general housekeeper which meant

that Sister with our help had to carry on at home. She was very bright and

good natured, although her health was frail, and we were devoted to her

and tried in our clumsy way to save her, but we did not know how, we were

all so young and so unaware of the pain and unspoken intensity of our

home and community life. Sister was full of fun and in no way preten-

tious—she sang beautifully—it was a joy to hear her. Mama being away

from home, all her chores fell upon Sister who never complained—but

she was always sick. We became alarmed because [from] the Wrst time the

doctor came it was always something the matter with Sister. Mama would

quit her job and come home, the house became very quiet and we were

awake all night [talking] in hushed voices in fear for Sister’s recovery. She

was strong willed and survived most difWculties and would seem to be well

and we would rejoice. So much of the sickness [Ogust Mae’s and others]

came from improper places to live—long distances to walk to school

improperly heated—a walk twice a day [they came home for lunch]—too

much work at home—natural conditions common to the poor that take

the bright Xowers like terrible cold in nature.20

Life in Paris gives me an anonymity and objectivity to release long stored

up memories of [the] beauty and sorrows of the difWcult work of orches-

trating and releasing into a personal form of color and design what seems

to me a long apprenticeship to jazz and spiritual songs augmented by the


deep hope given to my people in the deep south at home. I gave myself

to these experiences devotedly.21

With gratitude for his recovery of this text, one moves against orthrough Leeming’s seemingly necessary bracketed interpolations andthe primacy of interpretation, of the imposition of meaning, they imply.Listen to the sentence break or break down after the invocation of Sis-ter’s singing. That breakdown is not the negative effect of grammaticalinsufWciency but the positive trace of a lyrical surplus, counterpart to acertain tonal breakdown heard in Strayhorn’s performance of “LushLife” when the word “madness” is uttered with some uncontrollableaccompaniment, the internal exteriority of a voice which is and is nothis own. It is the possession of Delaney’s text by Ogust Mae and all ofthat for which she substitutes. We’ve got to think, then, what it meansto “lay awake all night in hushed voices,” think the political implica-tions and history of the primal overhearing of a phonic materialityalways tied to the ongoing loss or impossible recovery of the maternal.Leeming will go on to discuss what he records Delaney as sometimescalling “my forces,” pointing out that these voices/forces were in exis-tence as far back as the Knoxville of Delaney’s boyhood, but they areindexed to an already existing kernel of the illness which becomes moreand more insistent in Delaney and which will prompt, Wnally, the textabove.22 At the same time, the voices/forces also emerge, according toLeeming, as the concrete form of and response to a compartmentali-zation of Delaney’s life that became increasingly severe over the courseof his migrations and their punctuation in interracial and homosexualencounters. But the materiality of these voices not only exists beforeany development or decay purely internal to Delaney, it is irreducibleto Delaney’s illness as well. This black-advanced surplus is sexual andparanoid light and multiplied thick color, impasto—the laying on ofcolor thickly, one possible painterly equivalent of something Mackey,with reference to Eric Dolphy, refers to as the “multiply tongued,”something generally thought, in relation to Artaud, as glossolalia. This


music is not only the “last resort” of “wounded kinship,” but is also,precisely as that last resort, the emergence from broken matrilinearityof an insistent reproductive materiality. And we know how the longapprenticeship to the black music that the paintings represent is a longapprenticeship to the materiality of voices that the music represents.You should listen to Strayhorn represent right now.23

. . . not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And

one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/—as soon as I

lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me

back to her/(the motherfucker) . . .24

I used to go to all the very gay places/those come what may places/relax-

ing on the axis of the wheel of life/to get the feel of life.25

Impasto and glossoalia. Hearing the painting, Artaud is not formless.And the surplus in Strayhorn: too much rhyme (as in “Ci-git” but Stray-horn’s performance—live, recorded, him now “dead” as if this weren’tthat very deconstruction of or improvisation through the opposition oflife and death, that silent, surplus e) but the voice is all over, strained orfragile till strong g doubles up with and like the bass—the quickeneddisruption of the irreducible phonic substance, which is where univer-sality lies. Here lies universality: in this break, this cut, this rupture.Song cutting speech. Scream cutting song. Frenzy cutting scream withsilence, movement, gesture. The West is an insane asylum, a consciousand premeditated receptacle of black magic. Every disappearance is arecording. That’s what resurrection is. Insurrection. Scat black magic,but to scat or scatter is not to admit formlessness. The aftersound is morethan a bridge. It ruptures interpretation even as the trauma it recordsdisappears. AmpliWcation of a rapt countenance, stressed portraiture.No need to dismiss the sound that emerges from the mouth as the markof a separation. It was always the whole body that emitted sound: in-strument and Wngers, bend. Your ass is in what you sing. Dedicated to


the movement of hips, dedicated by that movement, the harmolodicallyrhythmic body. Artaud’s description of torture in Maryland was pub-lished in 1845, mama’s gone.

What if we understand the geographical history of the New York avant-garde chorographically, by way of the turning point? We could thinkit choreographically, bringing the aesthetic back on line, by way of arhythm analysis that would inject some choreographic play of encounterinto our analytic, making certain folks meet in the city. Turning pointmight then become vanishing point, where the absent presence of theperformance becomes the absent and structuring center of perspectivalurban space. We could think this in relation to the desire for bohemianspace and the way that desire is activated in and as the displacementof the ones who had been there. Such displacement is the carryover ofthose regimes of property from whence certain avant-garde Puritanshad Xed as the silencing of that internal antinomian difference that willhave always been both the renewal, expansion, invagination of the avant-garde and the recrudescence of enclosure and all that cuts it, before thefact of another mode of thinking that might be structured by and as acollaboration with what and who had been there before. This is thespatial politics of the avant-garde. This is to say that the avant-gardeis not only a temporal-historical concept but a spatial-geographicalconcept as well. Again, Hegel would have understood this. Constraint,mobility, and displacement are, therefore, conditions of possibility ofthe avant-garde. Deterioration is crucial to the avant-garde, as well: asa certain aesthetics, as an effect of disinvestment, as a psychic condition:the decay of form and the internal and external environment of regener-ative aesthetic production: turning, vanishing, enclosing, invaginating.26

But there’s rematerialization of bourgeois space-time that is alsowhat and where the avant-garde is. This avant-garde disrupts the phan-tasmatically solipsistic space of bourgeois aesthetic production and re-ception with some brought noise, voices/forces, mobilizing throughenforced hermeticisms. And this works with but also outside of AlainLocke’s formulation of a black migratory modernity; not outside but past.


And so a second and third move is what interests me here: a certainmovement through Harlem and beyond renaissance, a post-maturityof rebirth and removal, to Bohemia, to the Village, to Paris. BeaufordDelaney exempliWes not only this move but another, the outest move ofall, with and to and through Artaud you might say. This move could bethought as what Billy Strayhorn imagined: lush life as its own antidote,Paris reWgured as a kind of bright magic mountain. But all this move-ment is not simply felicitous. To move further and further into the heartof lightness, the city of light, is to more fully immerse oneself in the vastasylum of the West, “a conscious and premeditated receptacle of blackmagic.” Still, something is given off in these encountering migrations,the gesture in sound or the sound in painting of another liberty await-ing activation, the politico-economic, ontological, and aesthetic surplus.Such production—such radically ensemblic, radically improvisationalobjection—is the unWnished, continually re-en-gendered, actively re-en-gendering project of the black (and blue and sentimental) avant-garde.

Sound in Florescence (Cecil Taylor Floating Garden)

No reading27 of (the words mark a ritual, annular enactment—a fall:the sentence was broken here; a caesura—even, one could say, of thecaesura—has occurred. You could bridge the gap with one of manysimple denotations supposed to get to the ensemble of what I want you,now, to hear, but that would have already been unfaithful to the truthand attention carried in the name of what, now, I would have you hear.But this will not be a meditation on the idiom of ) Chinampas.28

No reading because the understanding of literary experiencewhich (a) reading implies is exceeded in the enactment of what Chinam-pas is and moves (to), what Chinampas demands: improvisation. And so Ihave been preparing myself to play with Cecil Taylor, to hear what istransmitted on frequencies outside and beneath the range of reading.Notes composed in the interest of that preparation: phrases:29

Charles Lloyd, asked to comment on a piece of his music by a radio inter-

viewer, answered “Words don’t go there.”30


Words don’t go there. Is it only music, only sound, that goes there? Per-haps these notes and phrases will have mapped the terrain and traversed(at least some of ) the space between here and there.

Words don’t go there: this implies a difference between wordsand sounds; it suggests that words are somehow constrained by theirimplicit reduction to the meanings they carry—meanings inadequate toor detached from the objects or states of affairs they would envelop.What’s also implied is an absence of inXection; a loss of mobility, slip-page, bend; a missing accent or affect; the impossibility of a slur or crackand the excess—rather than loss—of meaning they imply.

Where do words go? Are they the inadequate and residual traces of aritual performance that is lost in the absence of the recording?31

Where do words go? Where, into what, do they turn in Taylor’srendering: a generative disintegration, an emanation of luminous sound?The interinanimation of recording, verbal art and improvisation—whichChinampas is and enacts—places performance, ritual, and event withina trembling—that Chinampas escapes—between words’ Xorescence andthe constitutive absence of the book.32 Nevertheless that tremblingraises certain questions, for instance, that of the relationship betweenwords and their phrasing.33 Changes, like that from word to growl,occur here taking the word to where it does not go but neither to anyorigin as pure sound nor to the simple before of the determinations ofmeaning. This change and movement might be at the phonemic level,might mark the generation of or from a lost language and/or a newthing that is, in spite of its novelty, never structured as if the before thatis absent and indeterminate had never been or does not still remainthere. What is the nature of this “sexual cut,” this “[l]imbo [that] reXectsa certain kind of gateway to or threshold of a new world and the dislo-cation of a chain of miles,” that is evident in Taylor’s words and impro-visations of words?34 Is the only rigorous model one that necessitates theelimination of any previousness, any new world? Where do words go?

Where do words go? Where, to what, do they turn in Taylor’s ren-dering? A blur, like the typescript on the cover of the album,35 meaning


lifted by design, slurred by packaging, the rhythmic architecture of text,texture, textile

for example the Mande rhythm cloth, where patterns are juxtaposed against each

other, several different types of seemingly different patterns that come together

and make the ensemble garment. It’s acutely apparent on the poetry record

here the overdubs, the voices just sliding around and between each other because

(sings melody from Pemmican), but because I don’t know much music, or I don’t

know musical terms, it’s difWcult for me to articulate what it is that I’m hear-

ing. Good, you have to deWne for yourself, all the . . . (Spencer Richards,

Cecil Taylor)36

perhaps the blur signiWes that everything is (in) Cecil Taylor, is im-provisation or, more precisely, that the improvisation of a notion (or,perhaps more faithfully, a phenomenology) of the ensemble heretoforeweakly signaled in the sharp edges of words like “everything” is ineffect. Note that (in) is always parenthetical, between the opposingwords of that structure, between acts or wars, like Woolf and Jones,homologous with the phenomenon of erasure; everything is (in) erasure,the mark of an imaginary structure of homology, the additive andaggregative imposture of an antitotalitarian ensemble. But, with theseprovisos, the phrase, the broken sentence, holds (everything).

Taylor’s phrase will not be read.Performance, ritual, and event are of the idea of idiom,37 of the

“anarchic principles” that open the unrepresentable performance ofTaylor’s phrasing. What happens in the transcription of performance,event, ritual? What happens, which is to say what is lost, in the record-ing? I am preparing myself to play with Taylor. What is heard there?What history is heard there? There is one which is not just one amongothers

I’m really quite happy, or becoming more comfortable with the con-

ception that Ellington, after all, is the genius I must follow, and all the


methodological procedures that I follow are akin, more closely aligned to

that than anything else.38

the history of (an) organization, orchestra(tion), construction. The essenceof construction is part of what that phrasing is after; the poem of con-struction—geometry of a blue space, geometry of a blue ghost—is thepoem that is of the music

So, actually, last year for the Wrst time since the seventies I felt more like

a professional musician. I never want to be, nor do I consider myself one.

You say you don’t consider yourself a professional musician? I would

hope never to be a professional musician. So, if one has to, how would

you classify yourself? Ha, Ha, Ha . . . I’ve always tried to be a poet more

than anything else, I mean, professional musicians die. (Phone rings)39

/Then the music, the imagination from the music led into the words . . .

So that the music is primary, but everything is music once you care to

begin to apply certain principles of organization to it. So that I imagine

there is . . . people have told me they see a certain relationship between

the word and the music . . .40

A poetry, then, that is of the music; a poetry that would articulatethe music’s construction; a poetry that would mark and question theidiomatic difference that is the space-time of performance, ritual, andevent; a poetry, Wnally, that becomes music in that it iconically presentsthose organizational principles that are the essence of music. The thingis, these organizational principles break down; their breakdown dis-allows reading, improvises idiom(atic difference) and gestures towardan anarchic and generative meditation on phrasing that occurs in whathas become, for reading, the occluded of language: sound.

Let Taylor’s “musicked” speech and illegible words resonate andgive some attention to their broken grammar, the aural rewriting ofgrammatical rule that is not simply arbitrary but a function of the elu-sive content he would convey: what’s going on is either in an intersticeor of the ensemble, either between professionalism and its other—music


and poetry—or in the holism of a kind of everyday ritual.41 Taylor’spoetry: the geometry of a ghost? The physics of remembrance? Thearchitecture of the archétrace? Is there a continuity to be written hereor is the continuity in the cut of the phrase? I am preparing myself toplay with Cecil Taylor: what is the proper form of my endeavor? Per-haps the transcription of an improvisational blurrrring of the word;perhaps an improvisation through the singular difference of the idiomand its occasion; perhaps an acalculation of that function whose upperlimit is reading and whose lower limit is transcription—an improvisa-tion through phrases, through some virtual head and coda. Taylor saysto his interlocutor, “I’m listening.”42 Perhaps he will have said this tome or to the word: I’m listening, go on. Then perhaps the ensemble ofthe word, Taylor and I will have veered off into the silence that isembedded in the transformation, the truth that is held in the silence ofthe transformation, a truth that is only discernible in transformation.

Sound: suspended brightness, unrepresentable and inexplicable mysteryof (music is the improvisation of organization) ritual is music: princi-pled (archic) (spatial) organization that constitutes a kind of nonverbalwriting: transparent or instrumental, uninXected by the transformationsof a buzz-growl extension, bending whistle, hummm—

. . . there are and we experience the fact that there are several philosophi-

cal idioms and that this experience alone cannot not be lived by a philoso-

pher, by a self-styled philosopher, by whoever claims to be a philosopher,

as both a scandal and as the very chance of philosophy.43

but an improvisation (anarchic) of those principles that sees through:inWnite divisibilities and irreducible singularities; sites of communica-tions never to be received; rites of afXiction, tragedies, bodily divisions;spatial/social arrangements that constitute a kind of philosophical writ-ing enacted and reenacted in the annular rememberment and dismember-ment of community; nation and race; the imposition and maintenanceof hierarchical relations within these units; the vexed and impossible


task of a reconciliation of one and many via representation? Here it is ifI could work through expressive singularity, the im/possibility of directcommunication, the ideas of writing as visible speech and writing asindependent of speech. Here it is if idiom becomes the site where animprovisation of/through these might occur: not in the name of anoriginary creativity or a grounded and telic liberty, but of a free, whichis to say anarchic and atelic, generativity; a reconceptualization or out-from-outside reinstrumentalization of idiom that allows an improvisa-tion through rather than a deconstructive oscillation within the aporiaof philosophy.

Improvisation through the opposition of reading and transcription—precondition and effect of preparation to play with Taylor: the prepa-ration is the playing, the trace of another organization; it starts likeand away from a reading and ends like and beyond transcription but isneither homage to indeterminacy nor objectifying rendering nor reduc-tion to a narrow sense of “writing”; not about the hegemony of thevisual in reading, nor the suspicion of a singular vision; at the same timenot about the etiolation of a capturing picture.

In reading, Taylor’s performance—the prefatory dance, the gestures atthe instrument which produce/emit sound—along with his sound—independent, though it is, of the reduction of the word to verbal asser-tion—are too easily subordinated to the visual/spatial and the pervasiveoccularcentrism, structured around a set of obsolete temporal, ethical,and aesthetic determinations, which grounds it. Nevertheless, Taylor’spoetry, the geometry of a blue ghost, is full of spatial and directionalrenderings.

a curve having rotation in three

dimensions cutting spiral elements at a constant angle

These are improvised in

his sounding of them that I won’t read and can’t transcribe.


Though the visual/spatial binds, its occlusion distorts the undifferen-tiated but unWxed ensemble (ensemble) the remembrance of the auralgives. The echo of what is not but nothing other than unremembered isa wound in Derrida (for example), confounding the dream of anotheruniversality, conXating that dream with the vision of an old song, old-new language, homely sound, naïve or idiomatic writing. Here it isremedied in Taylor moving out from the outside, out from the para-doxes of idiom to offer up idiom’s re-sounding, one which avoids philo-sophical nationalism without devolving into transparent instrumentality,one that is not a reconceptualization but an improvisation of idiom in itsrelation/opposition to ritual via suspended luminescence, Xoating gar-den. That improvisation is activated in a sound which holds informationin the implicit graphics of its rhythm, a spatial orientation affecting aspatial representation that is sound become dispersive sensuality. So, ina kind of holosensual, holœsthetic reversal, one hears music in Taylor’svisual-spatial description and sees gestures and spaces in an aurality thatexceeds but does not oppose visual-spatial determination.

In Taylor Xoat/drift/linger/cut are fresh in the improvised parlance ofanother architecture, another geometry. The recording gives the traceof performance in the product or artifact, is a constative vessel of infor-mation maintaining the question of the product as determinate sign;yet it also marks a temporal/ethical problem that can be solved only byway of a radical movement through certain questions: of the trace asperformance, of sound, of the rending of the opposition of aurality andspatiality, of the opposition of speech and writing within verbality, ofthe question of the gestural in literary style, of the question of silenceand the absence of the break. . . .

“Rhythm is life, the space of time danced thru”44 the cut between eventand anniversary where sound, writing, ritual lie all improvised. Twopassages (of David Parkin and Claude Lévi-Strauss) to the crossing ofrhythm and ritual:


Ritual is formulaic spatiality carried out by groups of people who are con-

scious of its imperative or compulsory nature and who may or may not

further inform this spatiality with spoken words.45

The value of the ritual as meaning seems to reside in instruments and

gestures; it is a paralanguage. The myth on the other hand, manifests itself

as metalanguage; it makes full use of discourses, but does so by situating

its own signiWcant oppositions at a higher level of complexity than that

required by language operating for profane ends.46

In these passages ritual is primarily deWned by distinctions between itselfand forms of aural/verbal activity—most importantly, myth—in whichritual is seen as impoverished or by distinctions between itself and otherforms of nonverbal activity that, in their mundaneness, remain un-transformed by any ceremonial aura. Parkin focuses on the silent com-munication of propositions in ritual as that which matches or evenexceeds verbal assertion through spacing, position, or the visual-graphicarchitectonics that oscillate between Wxity and contestation. Accordingto Lévi-Strauss, however, words do go there, arriving under the motiveforce of “a higher level of complexity” than that afforded by the instru-mental or gestural in ritual. If one thinks, though, of a poetry reading—which may very well be (for) a “profane end”—one confronts that whichrequires that we take into account the ways ritual consists of physicalaction (in time) that may be, as well as emit or transmit, the kind ofmeaningful aural expression that improvises through the distinctionbetween the paralinguistic and the metalinguistic. And if words that hadbeen thought of as the elements of a purely constative expression areradically reconnected to their essential sonic performance by eccentricphysical action, by an excess of the physical (trill-making vibration oftongue or vowel-lengthening squint) that deforms the word conceivedof as a mere vessel of meaning, then that requirement becomes evenmore urgent. The attempt to read ritual as it is manifest in the sound ofsuch words or the attempt to transcribe myth transformed by gesture


and meaningful positionality might be better thought in terms of theimprovisation of ritual, writing, sound, idiom, event.

The spatio-temporal constitution of ritual raises ambiguities as well.On the one hand ritual is durative. The structure and dance of itspositions is ongoing, part of an annulus that seems unopposed to theuninterrupted process of the everyday against which it would be de-Wned. But what of the punctuality of the endlessly/daily repeated event?This punctuality is, too, of ritual, and ritual thus lends punctualitythe aura of ceremony: the special occasion. There is, then, a temporalcontradiction in the opposition of ritual and nonritual, one that acti-vates in both terms a juxtaposition that is manifest as the traumatic/celebratory and obsessional rhythmic breakage of the everyday andthat implies a directionality of time—a spatio-temporal constitution—that transforms rhythm into a double determination: of position ormovement, on the one hand, and syntagmic order on the other. ThusParkin’s focus on “the use made . . . of directionality—of axes, cardinalpoints, concentric zones and other expressions of spatial orientation andmovement”47

on the outside circumference Xushedtoward slant intersecting new reference point moves clockwise

andhis interest in the random and contingent effects of contestation as akind of reading-in-performance, a shifting and reshifting of spatial con-ventions and temporal order determined by a radical break as when, forinstance, the community cuts the body in an interinanimation of afXic-tion and renewal, the fragmentation of singular bodies and the coercivereaggregation of community.

Escaping the in/determination of the opposition or sacriWcial synthesisof rites of afXiction and renewal requires working through the logocen-trism of Lévi-Strauss, the occularcentric, spatio-temporal determinism


of Parkin and their interrelation in a discursive Weld grounded in anotion of singularity that I want to move through in my preparation.In Taylor’s, the spoken words, the speaking of the words, are not anarbitrary feature but are instead constitutive of that which is not butnothing other than (the improvisation of ) ritual, writing, ritual as aform of writing. There, the words are never independent of gesture, butthe gesture is never given priority over the words-as-sound. For ges-tures (and spatial direction) are given there as the sounded, re-sounded(which is to say transformed, bent, extended, improvised) and resound-ing (which is to say generative) word.

We then can deWne writing broadly as the communication of relatively speciWc

ideas in a conventional manner by means of permanent, visible marks.48

Here Elizabeth Hill Boone moves in the direction of a redeWnition ofwriting in anthropology in general and in the study of Mesoamericanand Andean graphic systems in particular. That movement is critical ofnotions of writing as the “visible speech” that marks a techno-spiritualdifference between cultures capable of graphic-verbal presentation andthose before or outside of the historico-temporal frame of the advancedor enlightened. That direction would lead to a more inclusive deWni-tion of writing, one able to acknowledge the rich constative capacitiesof nonverbal graphic systems, one that explicitly acknowledges the in-sistently unbridgeable gap separating the spoken word from any vis-ual representation. This direction, seen in conjunction with Parkin’sattempt to think through the constative/performative opposition thatgrounds Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the difference between myth and rit-ual, would also lead to an indelible connection between ritual, on theone hand, and writing, on the other hand, if writing is deWned in thebroader way that Boone lays out. Ritual and nonverbal graphesis wouldboth be seen as constative, and both would be subject to prejudicesthat end in the denial of that constativity. There is another similaritybetween Boone’s and Parkin’s projects that we’ll arrive at shortly (the


primacy of the visual-spatial), but these are enough to allow us to fol-low, for a bit, one of the paths this connection implies.

What kind of writing is Chinampas? Taylor presents no graphic system—if Chinampas is writing, it is so in the absence of visuality. Under whatconditions, then, could Chinampas be called “writing”? Perhaps withinan understanding of writing more broadly conceived as nonverbal, aswell as verbal, systems of graphic communication. Yet, since what wehave there is nongraphic verbal communication, the legitimacy of itsclaim to writing is not self-evident. Nevertheless ideas of and aboutgraphic systems are presented in Chinampas, sound distorting vision inthe improvisation of another writing; and image, position, and directionare so encoded—the visual-spatial so embedded—in the poem that whatwe have is something more complex even than some newly includedOutside of writing. Rather, Chinampas is out from the outside of writ-ing as it is conventionally deWned or redeWned in what have become con-ventional redeWnitions. Writing is, in Chinampas, a visual-spatial-tactileimprovisation of system that activates the aural resources of the lan-guage. The poem is an improvisation of writing not to be appropriatedby, not proper to, an older and somehow more inclusive graphesis: it isnot a valorization but an improvisation of the nonverbal; not an aban-donment but a (re)sounding of the visual-spatial.

A possible formulation based upon the inclusive redeWnition of writing:it’s not that Taylor creates visible speech; rather his is an aural writinggiven an understanding of writing that includes nonverbal graphic re-sources. This would almost presuppose that Taylor is interested ingrounding the aural in an originary writing (the “older and somehowmore inclusive graphesis” referred to above) that corresponds—as spa-tial, rhythmic organization—to ritual. Ritual here is implicitly con-ceived as Parkin explicitly describes it: a form of nonverbal graphic(visual/spatial) communication for which spoken words are merelysupplemental. We could say, then, that Taylor’s refers to an originary


writing that is neither hieroglyphic nor pictographic but geometric,positional, directional. In that referent, if not in Taylor’s reference, spo-ken words are not only nonoriginary, they are not even seen in termsof a reversal of traditional, conventional views of language in/and itsrelation to writing.

But this formulation doesn’t go there. Rather, what is required is a furtherreconWguration of Parkin, one that moves beyond the idea of constativeritual and beyond the idea of ritual as a form of graphic, nonverbal writ-ing to the extent that in such writing priority is given to, originarity isassumed for, the visual-spatial constellation of gesture, position, move-ment. That reconWguration is opened by Taylor’s aural improvisationof, rather than (un)silent adherence to, an originary writing-as-ritualand his infusion of the diagrammatics/diagraphesis of ritual with sound.For spoken words, especially when infused with the buzz hummm of themetavoice, are not a neutral (as Parkin implies) but a dangerous sup-plement to ritual-as-writing.49 Thus, on the one hand, “words don’t gothere” marks the inadequacy of verbal representation of sound while atthe same time signaling the excessive, out-from-the-outside motion andforce with which sound infuses the verbal. Words don’t go there; wordsgo past there. Bent. Turned. Blurrrred.

The picture is text, the image is writing, sounded and not visible thoughof a brilliant luminescence in the ensemble of the graphic, the (non)ver-bal, the aural. That ensemble is what the Xoating garden is: word liftedfrom stone or cloth; quipu (an article composed of colored and knottedstrings used in Andean cultures to recall various categories of knowl-edge that are speciWed by an interpreter; an article whose aesthetic isrelated to the tactile and to the tactile’s relation to rhythm)50 or rhythmcloth; text/ile, tactile. There meaning is held not unlike a talkingdrum holds meaning in tone and rhythm; meaning held, for instance,in “eighty-eight tuned drums,” independent of any simple, sentence-relational form, given only in phrasing and bent words. In that phras-ing Taylor moves, crucially, past whatever in/determination, whatever


singularity, the paradoxical interinanimation of ritual and idiom putsforward as if it were or could be The Event.

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of struc-

ture that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a

meaning which it is precisely the function of structural—or structural-

ist—thought to reduce or suspect. Let us speak of an “event,” neverthe-

less, and let us use quotation marks to serve as a precaution. What would

this event be then? Its exterior form would be that of a rupture and a

redoubling.

. . . up to the event which I wish to mark out and deWne, structure—

or rather the structurality of structure—although it has always been at

work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giv-

ing it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a Wxed origin. The

function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the struc-

ture—one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to

make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we

might call the play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of

the system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total

form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the

unthinkable itself.

Nevertheless, the center also closes off the play which it opens up

and makes possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution of con-

tents, elements, or terms is no longer possible. At the center, the permutation

or the transformation of elements (which may of course be structures

enclosed within a structure) is forbidden. At least this permutation has

always been interdicted (and I am using this word deliberately). Thus it

has always been thought that the center, which is by deWnition unique consti-

tuted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure,

escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could

say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The cen-

ter is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to

the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere . . .51

[my emphasis]


The event of which Derrida speaks, the putting of the structurality ofstructure, the center itself, into play, is the moment “when languageinvaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence ofa center or origin, everything became discourse . . . a system in whichthe central signiWed, the original or transcendental signiWed, is neverabsolutely present outside a system of differences.” Derrida writes ofan event, a rupture, which is also a circle, a circle of thinker-writers butalso a circle “unique” in its description of “the form of the relationbetween the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the historyof metaphysics.” Here he places the event within a narrative. Part ofwhat I would argue is that this placement of the event within narra-tive is The Event of the event, the rupture or caesura of the event thatoccurs within a paradoxical duration or contextualization or montagic-dialectical temporal mapping of the event. This self-rupture of singu-larity is precisely the geometric precondition of the circularity thatDerrida diagnoses and to which he succumbs: the self-deconstructivesingularity of the event is the axis on which the circle turns—the onethat is not central, the center that is not one. Restructuring could beseen, then, as the process by which structure is placed into play, whichis to say into narrative, into the circularity and tension of a narrativethat is composed of and that turns on elements or events.

Now we might easily be speaking of the song form as that de/centeredstructure that Taylor radically reformulates, if not abandons, preciselyby rethinking its status as the singular site of order in improvised music.52

For the point here is that in his aesthetic Taylor deals in what has trulybeen the unthinkable of the event-determined circularity of the history/narrative of the West and its thinking: the structure or totality that isun(de)composed by a center or its absence, by the event or The Eventand their absences. This is a possibility given in ensemble tone, in theimprovisation through a certain tradition of temporization and tympa-nization, through that tradition’s injunction to keep time in a simple way,on the beat (of the event), in that simplest (mis)conception—excusablebecause of the terminology (and we could all see why Plato would be


misled by James Brown in the Wrst place)—of the one. Am I sayingthat Taylor or The Godfather or the music in general is not trappedwithin the circle that is (the history of ) metaphysics as the slide awayfrom the ensemble it would propose? Am I saying that there is accessto the outside of this circle or that, somehow, we (who? we.) are alwaysalready outside it. Yes. I’m talking about something free of the circle,free of the eventual tension/tensing of (this) narrative. Other things arealso free.

What is immediately required is an improvisation of singularity, onethat allows us to reconWgure what is given beneath/outside the distinc-tion between the elements of the structure and its total form. Becausewhat I’m after is an asystematic, anarchic organizing principle (I notethe oxymoron), a notion of totality and (ensemble-)tonality at the con-junction of the pantonal and “that insistent previousness evading eachand every natal occasion.” But wait: the point here is not to make ananalogy between the deconstruction of the center and the organizationof the jazz ensemble: it’s to say that that organization is of totality, ofensemble in general. Among other things, this music allows us to thinkof tonality and the structure of harmony as it moves in the oscillationbetween voice and voicing, not in the interest of any numerical deter-mination (the valorization of the multiple or its shadow), not in theinterest of any ethico-temporal determination (the valorization of thedurative or of process), but for a kind of decentralization of the orga-nization of the music; a restructuring or, if you will, a reconstruction.Taylor is working through a metaphysics of structure, working throughan assumption that equates the essence or structurality of structure witha center. What I’m interested in in Taylor is precisely the refusal toattempt a return to the source: one that is not, on the one hand, for-getful of what is lost or of the fact of loss; one that is forgetive, onthe other hand, in the FalstafWan sense of the word—nimble and full ofWery and delectable shapes, improvisatory and incantatory when whatis structured in the mind is given over to the mouth, the birth, as (thatwhich is, Wnally, way more even than) excellent wit.


In “Structure, Sign, and Play” Derrida goes on to quote Lévi-Strauss’sThe Raw and the Cooked:

But unlike philosophical reXection, which aims to go back to its own

source, the reXections we are dealing with here concern rays whose only

source is hypothetical. . . . And in seeking to imitate the spontaneous

movement of mythological thought, this essay, which is also both too

brief and too long, has had to conform to the requirements of that

thought and to respect its rhythm.53

Lévi-Strauss and his differentiated echo in/as Derrida go on to thinkthis complex copresence of the question of center and origin in termsof myth and music:

Thus the myth and the musical work are like the conductors of an orches-

tra, whose audience becomes the silent performers. If it is now asked

where the real center of the work is to be found, the answer is that this is

impossible to determine. Music and mythology bring man face to face

with potential objects of which only the shadows are actualized.54

Here the musical becomes a sign for the absence of center by way ofan all-too-facile assumption of some correspondence between myth andmusic. What happens when we begin to think music in its relation toritual? Myth and text (myth as the written text of the music, betrayinga musical rendition of a certain logocentric assumption in Lévi-Strauss)operate in Lévi-Strauss as the agents of a structural Wxity whose sub-mission to the law of supplementarity Derrida would always enforce.In this sense, for Derrida, there is a correspondence between myth,text, and totality that is troubled by a form of musical organizationlike Taylor’s. Now we are dealing in precisely that absence of the centerthat Lévi-Strauss and Derrida both read and comment upon. Both deal,Derrida more knowingly or self-consciously, with the tension in theirwork between structure—that which is unthinkable without a center—and the absence of center. This tension is productive; it constitutes orproduces something, namely, philosophy. But I’m interested precisely in


the unthinkable of philosophy in Taylor’s work. For the unthinkable,as we can easily show, is not structure in the absence of the center (forwe see all the time that this absence is constitutive of structure; this iswhat Derrida shows); rather, the unthinkable is structure or ensemblethought independently of any tension between itself and some absentorigin. The unthinkable is a tone. That tone is to be thought neither asor in its absence (atonality) nor as/in its multiplicity or plenitude (pan-tonality): it is rather an ensemble tone, the tone that is not structuredby or around the presence/absence of singularity or totality, the tonethat is not iterative but generative. (Note that Lévi-Strauss insists on acertain iconicity, insists that discourse on myth must itself becomemythic, must have the form of which it speaks. Certainly Derrida fol-lows this formulation to the extent that the old-new language may onlybe spoken of from within, that it constitutes its own true metalanguage,thereby driving Alfred Tarski and his deWnition of truth as the relationbetween object- and meta-language crazy such that the old-new lan-guage is not only its own metalanguage but its own truth.)

Taylor’s is a voice in the interruption of race and nation, just as it is avoice in the interruption of the sentence and, indeed, in the interruptionof the word itself. He works the anarchic irruption and interruptionof grammar, enacting a phrasal improvisation through the distinctionbetween poetry and music in the poetry of music, the programmaticmanifesto that accompanies the music, that becomes music and turnsmusic into poetry. These things occur

between regions of partialshadow and complete illumination

in the cut.

Taylor’s also bears the trace of (the peculiar) institution and its organi-zation—its deconstruction and reconstruction. This in connection tothe continuous or anniversarial, the institutional-durative: marriage-birth-death-seasonal change; the temporal difference within ritual thatcorresponds to ritual’s temporal difference from, on the one hand, myth


and, on the other hand, the mundane since rituals “involve a liminalphase, a betwixt and between element and so presuppose an initial phaseof separation and one of reaggregation.”55 But let’s enact and reenactthe separation of separation and reaggregation: rather, let’s linger, Xoatin the limbo of that cut, in order to mark nothing akin to an initialphase or prior singularity, but, instead, to mark “the insistent previous-ness evading each and every natal occasion.” The trauma of separationis marked here, but not the separation from a determinate origin: ratherthe separation from the improvisation through origin: the separationfrom ensemble. How could we have heard the sound of justice calledin/by the long duration of the trauma if it hadn’t been improvised?

Parmenides is, as far as we know, the Wrst among many to “recognize”an essential connection between thinking and being: his poem is theoriginary text of that harmony, the originary written moment at whichthe shadow of what must be conceived of as a more fundamental for-mulation, a more elemental and singular form, is revealed. One wonderswhat the relation is between the writing of the poem—within which thetrace of a sound remains to be discerned or at least reconstructed fromits shards—and that harmony. One wonders whether the harmony uponwhich Western metaphysics is founded is not itself founded on—or mostclearly manifest at—the intersection of music and poetry, which itselfseems to signal a prior and barely available unity of the two in mousike:the singularization of the muses’ art, the distillation of the ensemble ofthe aesthetic.

Only the trace of mousike is available to us and only by way of atracing of the history of its dissolution. Under the heading “Music andPoetry,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics makes a briefsurvey of that history, moving from “the Egyptian ‘hymn of the sevenvowels,’ [which] appears to have exploited the overtone pitches presentin the vowels of any language” to the Wrst disjunctions (through whichTaylor improvises) between systems of linguistic pitch, on the one hand,and systems of quantitative meter, on the other; from the technical ori-gins of alphabetic writing-as-musical notation to the hegemonic excess


of the visual-written and the differentiation of the arts it helps to solid-ify; from elemental mousike to its division/reaggregation as poetry andmusic to its fourfold fragmentation into poetic and musical performanceand musical and rhetorical theory within which can be located thatopposition between praxis and theoria that is never not connected tothe harmony of thinking and being that constitutes philosophy’s originand end.56 What becomes clear is a historical movement from the prior-ity of sonic gesture to the hegemony of visual (which is to say theoret-ical) formulation. The written mark—the convergence of meaning andvisuality—is the site of both excess and lack; the word-supplement—only theorizable in the occlusion of its sound—endlessly overshoots itsdestination; words don’t go there. Perhaps it is now possible to give amore satisfactory understanding of this claim, one that is concerned notonly with where words do go, but with the nature and position of the“there.” First, though, it is necessary to think the effect of that dual spa-tialization/visualization of the word—its placement within an economydetermined by movement, instrumentalization, position and theoriza-tion—which troubles any distinction between ritual and myth.

“Chinampa—an Aztec word meaning Xoating garden.”57 This imagemoves toward what is made even closer by the conjunction of the image(of the title or name) and the sound (of the saying of what it marks orholds). It signals a suspension that is free or that frees by virtue of thecontagion of its movement: when one sees a Xoating garden or is con-fronted with the sound that stems from the word-image, one lingersabove or below surface and in what is open there. The surface or topog-raphy upon which a spatio-temporal mapping depends is displaced by agenerative motion. One imagines the possibilities inherent in that Xoat-ing, the chance of a dropping off or an extension of certain of thosesounds that require a vibrating surface: the n, m, p are put in motion,deepening and rearranging the sound of the word. This loosening ispart of Taylor’s method: of the word from its meaning, of the soundsfrom the word in the interest of a generative reconstruction, as if all ofa sudden one decided to refuse the abandonment of the full resources


of language, as if one decided no longer to follow the determining,structuring, reductive force of law.

There is a piece of musicpoetry by Taylor entitled “Garden”whose words have been collected in Moment’s Notice, a set of texts thatmark the hope or call of a destination for words and for writing.58 Read-ing “Garden” raises questions concerning its difference from Chinampas,one of which I’d like to address in passing. It is, perhaps unavoidably, aquestion of spacing or position, a question always shadowed by imma-terial visualization: what is the Xoating garden? Perhaps this: the gardenthat Xoats is the one that lingers in another, improvisational sense ofthe aesthetic ensemble that is no simple return to an imagined andoriginary singularity. Instead the Xoating garden marks the unprece-dented present within which the aesthetic is “ongoingly” reconWguredand reconWguring, bent and bending; within which the illusion of anyimmediacy of sound is re/written and the overdetermined and deferredWxity of writing is un/written by the material and transformative pres-ent of sound.

It’s like when Coltrane, having been shown a transcription of hissolo on “Chasin’ the Trane,” was unable to sight-read what he’d impro-vised. The beautiful distance between sound and the writing of soundrequires a kind of faith that could only be measured, for instance, inTaylor’s inability to read

Chinampas #5´04�

ANGLE of incidence

being matter ignited

one sixtieth of luminous intensity

behind wind

beginning spiral of two presences

shelter

light drum

angle of incidénce observant of sighns


be’s core based Wber conducting impulses Xattened spirals of spirit

prompting letter per square centimeter of three

dimensions

swept cylinder and cone

cutting shape of drying bodiesNow pulverized

having fed

on cactí

arranged service of constant spiral elements of Xoating cocineal and

kaaay and kaay and kaay

and agité an-agité and kaay

and kaay and

yyeeagiye yoa,

ya yoa

deposits of hieroglyphic regions

womb of continuing light

preexisting blood per square centimeter of aBlaack bhody

a curve having rotation in three dimensions

cutting spiral elements at a constant angle

behind wind

the inexpresssssible inclusion

of one within another

a lustrous red, reddish brown or black natural Wll compact or

attacked

POINT fixed on circumference

curve about red

does in fact alter regions of contact as a rooase

on the outside circumference Xushed toward slant

intersecting new reference point

moves clockwise

representing a frequency’s

distribution

each bend of ordinan equals the sum in singular

youas youas youas


proceeding enclosure engulWng unending spiral

undulation

there Xoating amidst aliana and overhead

romela romelaya romela romelaya a ceeia

invisible expressions of warmed snakewood soothed by exudation

of sloed balsam

scent

is arielroot elixir is knowing circle crossed at oiled extremity

in center of wing burring

creates Wre in air

serpent is preexisting light light yeah

the meter maintained is ôpen yet a larger whorl

describing orbit of earth

eaters incisors as omniscient

pochee aida aida huelto aida aida huedo

uniting of three astral plains/planes corresponding to a serpent

synthesis

altering the sliii´de

disengage´d ecliptic traveling

due north

skip through at least two successive meridians

diagonal shear

uniting as macrocosm Wve heads degrees of tangiBle ahhb jects

graded ascension of Xoor levels

suspended voice

vibrations

held within concretized mur’eau de perfume breath

again Xoating

’tween lighted mooon ///soar

and silent cross of bird sensing cold at base

invisible to source of satyrial/siderial turn Between regions of

partial


shadow and complete illumination.

omnipotence

omnipotence the Xorescence of the perpendicular

omnipotence

the Xoresce of the perpendicular pentamorphic

the Xorescence of the perpendicular pentamorphic

perpendicular pentamorphic

(kiss, silences, rhythm)

. . .

Praying with Eric

The title comes from a Mingus composition and requires some medi-tation on the brilliant proliferation of Eric Dolphy’s sacred, unknowntongues. This is a preface on improvisation and it will move towardDolphy and his destinations by way of an ambivalent transport fromRalph Ellison to Nathaniel Mackey, from “the music of invisibility” to“optic utterance.”

Improvisation is located at a seemingly unbridgeable chasmbetween feeling and reXection, disarmament and preparation, speechand writing. Improvisation—as the word’s linguistic roots indicate—isusually understood as speech without foresight. But improvisation, inwhatever possible excess of representation that inheres in whateverprobable deviance of form, always also operates as a kind of foreshad-owing, if not prophetic, description. So that the theoretical resourcesembedded in the cultural practice of improvisation reverse, even asthey bear out, the deWnition that etymology implies and the theoreticalassumptions it grounds. That which is without foresight is nothingother than foresight. And if improvisation is to be thought other thansimply as action or speech without provision, you need to look aheadwith a kind of torque that shapes what’s being looked at. You need todo so without constraints of association, by way of a twisted epoché, orredoubled turn, in the prescription and extemporaneous formation andreformation of rules, rather than the following of them. Extemporaneity


is often associated with not looking ahead, the absence of forethought,a lack of planning, preparation, and also an absence of prescriptivevision: but improvisation in the music allows another transcription ofpreviousness. Improvisation is already an improvisation of improvisa-tion: through the oppositions implicit in the etymology, through theproscriptive and differential temporality of those oppositions; on theone hand, anarchic and ungrounded, opening a critique of traditions andTradition, and on the other hand, no simple and naive, unplanned andnonhistorically driven, inscription; on the one hand, the very essence ofthe visionary, the spirit of the new, an organizational planning of andin free association that transforms the material, and on the other hand,manifest in and as the material. Thus improvisation is never manifest asa kind of pure presence—it is not the multiplicity of present momentsjust as it is not governed by an ecstatic temporal frame wherein thepresent is subsumed by past and future. Improvisation must be under-stood, then, as a matter of sight and as a matter of time, the time of alook ahead whether that looking is the shape of a progressivist line orrounded, turned. The time, shape, and space of improvisation is con-structed by and Wgured as a set of determinations in and as light, by andthrough the illuminative event. And there is no event, just as there isno action, without music.

Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have Wve. There is a certain

acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its

vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like to hear

Wve recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing “What Did I Do

to Be so Black and Blue”—all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen

to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin.

I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the

vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyri-

cal sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out

of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invis-

ible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music.

Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I


lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a

strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different

sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead,

sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible Xowing of time,

you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from

which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s

what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music.59

So under the spell of the reefer I discovered a new analytical way of lis-

tening to music. The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic

line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and

waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself

hearing not only in time, but in space as well. I not only entered the music

but descended, like Dante, into its depths. And beneath the swiftness of the

hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it and looked around

and heard an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz as Xamenco,

and beneath that lay a still lower level on which I saw a beautiful girl the color

of ivory pleading in a voice like my mother’s as she stood before a group of slave

owners who bid for her naked body, and below that I found a lower level and a

more rapid tempo and I heard someone shout.60

“Brothers and Sisters, my text this morning is the ‘Blackness of

Blackness.’”

And a congregation of voices answered: “That blackness is most black,

brother, most black . . . ”

. . . “Black will make you . . .”

“Black . . .”

“. . . or black will un-make you.”

“Ain’t it the truth, lawd?”

And at that point a voice of trombone timbre screamed at me, “Git out of

here, you fool! Is you ready to commit treason?”

And I tore myself away, hearing the old singer of spirituals moaning, “Go

curse your God, boy, and die.”

I stopped and questioned her, asked her what was wrong.


“I dearly loved my master, son,” she said.

“You should have hated him,” I said.

“He gave me several sons,” she said, “and because I loved my sons I learned

to love their father though I hated him too.”

“I too have become acquainted with ambivalence,” I said. “That’s why

I’m here.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing, a word that doesn’t explain it. Why do you moan?”

“I moan this way ’cause he’s dead,” she said.

“Then tell me, who is that laughing upstairs?”

“Them’s my sons. They glad.”

“Yes, I can understand that too,” I said.

“I laughs too, but I moans too. He promised to set us free but he never could

bring hisself to do it. Still I loved him . . .”

“Loved him? You mean . . . ?”

“Oh yes, but I loved something else even more.”

“What more?”

“Freedom.”

“Freedom,” I said. “maybe freedom lies in hating.”

“Naw, son, it’s in loving. I loved him and gave him the poison and he

withered away like a frost-bit apple. Them boys woulda tore him to pieces with

they homemade knives.”

“A mistake was made somehwere,” I said, “I’m confused.” And I wished

to say other things, but the laughter upstairs became too loud and moan-like for

me and I tried to break out of it, but I couldn’t. Just as I was leaving I felt an

urgent desire to ask her what freedom was and went back. She sat with her head

in her hands, moaning softly; her leather-brown face was Wlled with sadness.

“Old woman, what is this freedom you love so well?” I asked around a

corner of my mind.

She looked surprised, then thoughtful, then bafXed. “I done forgot, son. It’s

all mixed up. First I think it’s one thing, then I think it’s another. It gits my head

to spinning. I guess now it ain’t nothing but knowing how to say what I got up

in my head. But it’s a hard job, son. Too much is done happen to me in too short

a time. Hit’s like I have a fever. Ever’ time I starts to walk my head gits to


swirling and I falls down. Or if it ain’t that, it’s the boys; they gits to laughing

and wants to kill up the white folks. They’s bitter, that’s what they is . . .”

“But what about freedom?”

“Leave me ’lone. Boy; my head aches!”

I left her, feeling dizzy myself. I didn’t get far.61

Then somehow I came out of it, ascending hastily from this under-

world of sound to hear Louis Armstrong innocently asking,

What did I do

To be so black

And blue?

At Wrst I was afraid; this familiar music had demanded action, the

kind of which I was incapable, and yet had I lingered there beneath the

surface I might have attempted to act. Nevertheless, I know now that few

really listen to this music.62

Ellison knows that you can’t really listen to this music. He knows,before Mackey as it were, that really listening, when it goes bone-deepinto the sunken ark of bones, is something other than itself. It doesn’talternate with but is seeing; it’s the sense that it excludes; it’s the en-semble of the senses. Few really read this novel. This is alarming eventhough you can’t really read this novel. That’s why it calls for and triesto open a new analytic way of listening and reading, an improvisationattuned to the ensemble of work’s organization and production, theensemble of the politico-economic structure in which it is produced andthe ensemble of the senses from which it springs and which it stimulates.This would be something like a channeling—in and through history—of something more fundamental than the mark of locality: localizedmovement, extremely determined dream of a speciWc genius, the novelis not about the delineation of the unitary and singular trait, even if thattrait is absolute singularity itself. This is to say—in the invocation ofcut, channel—that the novel is about the structures and æffects of race.


The mark of invisibility is a visible, racial mark; invisibility hasvisibility at its heart. To be invisible is to be seen, instantly and fasci-natingly recognized as the unrecognizable, as the abject, as the absenceof individual self-consciousness, as a transparent vessel of meaningswholly independent of any inXuence of the vessel itself. Ellison phono-graphs this problematic paradox, bringing the noise to in/visibility. Thequestion is whether aurality ever actually exerts an improvisational forcein, against, and through the ocularcentric structuration of recognition.Invisible Man narrates and describes a certain habitation of this para-dox; its prologue records the theoretical particulars implied in such anattempt. The prologue would set the speciWcally musical conditions fora possible redetermination of the ocular-ethical metaphysics of race andthe materiality of the structure and æffects of that metaphysics. Butthere is a question concerning the noise’s resistance to such fatal envi-sioning. How to activate the noise’s transcendence of the ocular frame?Such questioning is not in the interest of replacing the ocular with theaural, not in the interest of putting another metaphysics forward.Rather, one is interested in what the noise carries—not that it’s some-thing Wgured as other than the ocular, just that it’s critically easier todiscern while remaining, paradoxically or not, so profoundly avoided.What there is in the music is irreducible to music; meanwhile, racial-ization is given in a visualization of music that forestalls the enactmentof what the music holds.

If the prologue of Invisible Man holds all that is played out in andmuch of what happens beyond the novel, then the epilogue is a fright-ened attempt to retreat into the etiolated metaphysics of America—where the ends of philosophy, history, and man converge; where the un-workable telos of one and many, the radical segregation of prophecy anddescription, is carried out. The novel’s body presents episode after iconicepisode, each given as a particular frame of black identity and writing.The prologue holds not only the content but the form of such revela-tion. It opens the very possibility of the framing of the novel accordingto the opposition of continuity and succession and always already holdsthe deconstruction of this very structure—which is constitutive of our


understanding of narrative—as a possibility. The prologue imaginesa depth that holds out both the frightening chance of a descent intoethnocentric and separatist identity (the sons of the moaner, violentlaughter and scream) and the hope of a radical improvisation by way ofthe music and what it holds for action. The novel is driven by thisopposition—by the inability to linger and the rationalization of thatinability. That rationalization demands that the music’s transgressionof the very laws of being and time to which Ellison Wnally submitsmust also be domesticated. This domestication is a kind of nationalistreconWguration wherein the music is presented as the trope of a cer-tain understanding of totality as America, of representation as America,of democracy as America, of the future—which is to say the end—asAmerica.

One way to get through this Ellisonian invocation of what JacquesDerrida calls the “onto-theology of national humanism”63 is somethinglike what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a “queer performative.”64 We’llsee how Amiri Baraka, for instance, in both approach and avoidance,enacts such a cut interpellation. But maybe all such resigniWcations orredeployments bear this active, if muted, infelicity, this unhappiness ofnomination or incomplete christening. And think the relation of con-vention to repetition, think the way convention’s dependence upon rep-etition is the condition of its in/security. So that if we imagine a spacebetween repetitions then we imagine something impossible to locate.The moment between moments presents massive ontological problems,like the attempt to establish the reality of pure mathematical objects(for instance, a set, an ensemble). Perhaps political upheaval is in thenonlocatability of discontinuity. Art tries to Wctionalize and/or redeploysuch location among other things—but now we speak of the artiWcialityor artifactuality of every rupture in the same way that we would speakof the forgiveness (a cool slip of the Wnger, speeahh: I meant to write“Wctiveness”) of some absolute durative stability. What one begins toconsider, as a function of the nonlocalizable nature or status of dis-continuity, is a special universalization of discontinuity, where discon-tinuity could be Wgured as ubiquitous minority, omnipresent queerness.


The tragic and happy (in/felicitous) universality of absolute (temporal-ontological-performative) singularity is what Derrida might say. Any-way, this is just meant to trouble, by disseminating, the break or cut.65

What is needed is an improvisation of the transition from descentto cut, an audition of the ancient preWguring trace of the cut in thedepths, an activation of lingering by and in the cut (and of the possibil-ity of action in lingering and the promise of freedom in action). Ellison’sWguration of “the blackness of blackness” opens certain things up: whatwould be broached in that section is the impossibly originary blackmoment, the maternal origin of this universal doubleness. The claim tothat origin is already late; its coherence is a function of some irrefer-able thing that came before it and whatever comfort it gives bears thevery structure of attenuation. Its reference to the knowledge of andaction for freedom occurs as an ironic afWrmation of freedom’s etiola-tion and in the denial of freedom’s connection to the individual voice.The doubleness (blackness) of blackness is given as the aftermath of adetermined, durative, Xeshly, sexual encounter: the symbolic is cast inreference to the materiality of the miscegenative natal occasion.66 Themoaner, the singer of gospel music, puts this forth: that we love thedevil because he is us. He gives us (and, implicitly, we give him) iden-tity: this has the fundamental belatedness, ambivalence, and persistenceof the dialectic.

In the blackness of blackness, the doubleness of blackness, thefucked-up whiteness of the essence of blackness, there is an instantiationof a kind of dialog between knowledge of in/visibility and the absenceof that knowledge, between improvement and the vernacular. The ver-nacular, in the Wgure of Armstrong, is the one who lacks the knowledgeof his own in/visibility. This is a geographico-class dynamic—playedout, for instance, already on the pages of The Souls of Black Folk as fore-shadowing description of The New Negro—wherein modernity and migra-tion are the elements of an uplifting convergence. But there is a sexualdynamic as well that remains to be played out. Why is the moaner’svernacular voice—moaning trombone (or trumpet) always on the vergeof an unwording, inseparable from the lumpen, violent, hypermasculine


laughter that it spawns—not edited from within or without but supple-mented such that the knowingly invisible interlocutor, the one whoassumes the need for or prior presence of a supplement, is quickly re-vealed to be at a loss when seen against the anoriginal knowledge offreedom this woman has?67 Finally, the opposition between the vernac-ular and the modern, the black and the white, is to be thought preciselyin that they are both, if they are real, the product of a miscegenativeencounter that exists as a function of the difference between the actorsand the internal difference of the encounter. Indeed, it would be moreprecise to say that we are dealing, again, with structure and æffect,doubled and redoubled. But the deep-down love, the bone-deep love,convergence of death and love, memory and narrative (that’s what recog-nition is), that accompanies the miscegenative origin of black /Americanidentity is exceeded by another love: that of/for freedom. And freedom,here, is not the etiolation that comes as the emergence of individualvoice; it is, rather, the ensemblic improvisation that evades the en-counter of the others as natal occasion and its pharmacoepic oscillation.Something irreferable—before the ongoing exchange of poisonous giftand available only by way of the disconnection such exchange enforcesand, as connection, undermines—lies in wait in cut, augmented, instru-mentalized speech like a depth charge.

Redoubled blackness is determined in the encountering time of acaesura, in a dialectic of recognition and abjection, enlightenment andunconcealment; but its condition of possibility lies before this. Access-ing this before is, at least in part, accomplished in the improvisationthrough in/visibility, the interinanimation of light and music, visionand sound. This interinanimation must exceed any mere juxtaposition:it requires some sustained thinking in the music that, again, is exces-sive of any analytic. It requires some methodological investigation ofthe problematics of “really listening,” of, for instance, the problematicsensual-cognitive reduction whose trace is borne by that phrase.

Invisible Man represents the dialectic of improvement, the tran-sition from the vernacular to the modern, but it also offers a quitedevastating critique of that progression while fatalistically clinging to


the hope of a puriWcation of the principles and categories that wouldground it. Here a kind of revolutionary enlightenment contains revolu-tionary unconcealment as a particularly special moment or potent andproblematic possibility: the imaginary violent rebirth, the screaminglaughter of the sons of the moaner/mourner, where the possibility thatfreedom lies in hating remains to be sung as, say, “BLACK DADANIHILISMUS.”68 We could say, then, that the novel between its ends,between the prologue and the epilogue, between the sexual cut and theemergence, submergence, and reemergence of the individual subject inand from out of the depths, is about the supposed transition from ver-nacular to modern, from in/visibility (as unreXective expression, an unar-ticulated juxtaposition of light and sound) to knowledge of in/visibility(as the conjugation of light and sound as if they were ever two in theWrst place), from a jook joint in some outlying parish to Minton’s Play-house, from whatever Armstrong echoes to whoever replicates CharlieChristian. Still, at the end, Invisible Man awaits what only the cut cangive and what is preWgured in its prologue. As Houston Baker might say,whatever manifests itself as modernity was embedded in the vernacularall along. Meanwhile, the sexual cut keeps the question of the ontolog-ical constitution of the vernacular open despite all attempts at closure.

The rhythm of in/visibility is cut time: phantasmatic interruptionsand fascinations. Stories are propelled by this formation of inhabitabletemporal breaks; they are driven by the time they inhabit, violentlyreproducing, iconizing, improvising themselves. The break that drivesand is Invisible Man constitutes the continuity and the incommensura-bility of the prologue and the epilogue, which is to say the continuitybetween and the incommensurability of the intimation of the improvi-sational and afWrmative agency of ensemble and its etiolated calculationas the synthesis of one and many, individuality and collectivity, differ-ence and universality. The visionary force of the prologue succumbs, inthe break, to a pure description: from an awareness (though admittedly,conventionally privatized) of the imperatives of improvisation—“thisfamiliar music had demanded action, the kind of which I was incapable,and yet had I lingered there beneath the surface I might have attempted


to act”—through an interpretive but faithful rendition of “the invisiblemusic of my isolation” (always already overdetermined by the individu-alism of that originary understanding of improvisation’s ethical imper-ative) to the nonimprovisational (because formed within the oppositionof individual and collective, race and humanity) re/capitulation of thatimperative: “Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is notprophecy, but description.”69 A certain understanding of totality is givenas a possibility in the improvisatory break, even in that break’s regram-matical irruption into Ellison’s erstwhile sentence. The dash produceswhat Mackey’s N. remembers as “the feeling I’ve gotten from thecharacteristic, almost clucking beat one hears in reggae, where thesyncopation comes down like a blade.”70 The image given in the soundthe dash produces is “one of a rickety bridge (sometimes a ricketyboat) arching Wner than a hair to touch down on the sands at, say, Abid-jan.”71 See, when we check the sexual cut—“an insistent previousness evad-ing each and every natal occasion”72—it speaks of a beginning whoseorigin is never fully recoverable, never operative as the end of any imag-ined return, and moves in the almost impossible demand of an embraceof the bridge’s double Wguration as both connection and disconnection.There is no inactive suspension between any rendering of the readingsubject undecidable and any simple revalorization of some old and sin-gular version of that subject. Rather, the bridge becomes, precisely in itsdoubleness, something other than itself that is yet to be determined. Itwill not compensate for a re-en-gendering rupture that the Wnenessof its arch renders unavoidable; the distance to Abidjan is asymptotic butunbridgeable and is no more so than that to any (thankfully) unap-proachable America. The bridge is something other. In/visible music,“seen-said belief,” will lead us, eventually, to the question of the bridge.

Cecil Taylor offers the following formulation concerning improvisation:

The player advances to the area, an unknown totality, made whole

thru self-analysis (improvisation), the conscious manipulation of known

material . . .73


What is self-analysis? What is the direction toward unknown totality?Talking cure, the verbal interruption of the innerview, “The new blackmusic is this: Wnd the self then kill it.”74 This is the strenuous play ofthe new thing, this incalculable set of black singularities. It will neverbe possible to think this set outside of the theme of sexual difference, atheme now inseparable from psychoanalysis. Let’s extend the record ofsome out improvisations; this is the record of an out confrontation, aDerridean mode of transport or transfer between Ellison and Mackey,an engaged and demure, sounded and silent, carrying on.

I should try to answer or perhaps to carry on.

But I will tell you that I indeed feel disarmed. This evening I have come

as disarmed as possible. And disarrayed. I did not want to prepare for this

session, I did not want to prepare myself. As deliberately as possible, I

have chosen—which I think has never happened to me before—to expose

myself to the course of a debate, and must also be said of a show, without

any defensive or offensive anticipation (which always somewhat amounts

to the same). In any event with as little anticipation as possible. I thought

that if something was to occur tonight, by hypothesis the event would be

on this condition, to wit, that I come without preparation, neither on dis-

play or on parade, as without ammunition as possible, and if it is possible.

Therefore I have come, if, at least, I have come, saying to myself:

something will happen tonight only on condition of your disarmament.

But you might suspect me of exaggerating with this agonistic lan-

guage: he says that he is disarmed in order to disarm, a well-known device.

Certainly. Therefore, I immediately add: I have not come, I did not want

to, I still do not want to, I have not come naked.

I have not come naked, not come without anything.

I have come accompanied by a small—how to put it, a small phrase,

if it is one, only one, very small.75


If something is to happen you have to come unprepared, unarmed;but you don’t come with nothing. You’ve got to bring something thatadorns you even if it doesn’t arm you. Just a very small phrase, the noiseof a small phrase if it is one, just the spirit of some phrasing, the softracket of a small accompaniment. You’ve got to be adorned with thesmallest augmentation. Derrida’s strange amalgam of foresight and dis-armament—occasioned by a foray into that foundation or fortress ofpsychoanalysis called “confrontation”—makes necessary and real whathad otherwise been sheer fantasy: “So there was a movement of nostal-gic, mournful lyricism to reserve. Perhaps encode, in short to renderboth accessible and inaccessible. And deep down this is still my most naïvedesire.”76 For Derrida the naïve and the idiomatic converge at thatwhich is nothing other than improvisation, than an otherwise alwaysinterdicted being-prepared-to-improvise, by way of an extended, indi-rect, circular migration.

JACQUES DERRIDA: . . . I feel as if I’ve been involved, for twenty years, in a

long detour, in order to get back to this something, this idiomatic writ-

ing whose purity I know to be inaccessible, but which I continue, none-

theless, to dream about.

LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR: What do you mean by “idiomatic”?

J.D.: A property you cannot appropriate; it somehow marks you without

belonging to you. It appears only to others, never to you—except in

Xashes of madness which draw together life and death, which render

you at once alive and dead. It’s fatal to dream of inventing a language or

a song which would be yours—not the attributes of an “ego,” but rather,

the accentuated Xourish, that is the musical Xourish of your own most

unreadable history. I’m not speaking about style, but of an intersection

of singularities, of manners of living, voices, writing, of what you carry

with you, what you can never leave behind. What I write resembles, by

my account, a dotted outline of a book to be written, in what I call—at

least for me—the “old new language,” the most archaic and the newest,

unheard of, and thereby at present unreadable. You know that the oldest


synagogue in Prague is called the Old-New? Such a book would be quite

another thing; nonetheless, it would bear some resemblance to this train

of thought. In any case, it is an interminable remembering, still seeking

its own form: it would be not only my story, but also that of the culture,

of language, of families, and above all, of Algeria. . . .77

The idiomatic is an inalienable property yet to have been accomplished,a quality both always already present and achieved only by way of animpossible return. And how do we reconcile the necessities of bothreturn and detour? No. More precisely, how do we deal with their inter-inanimation? In this case return is accomplished by way of a reroutingstructured by properly philosophical refusals to improvise, proper val-orizations of writing over speech, given, in this instance, in relationto Freud’s incalculable achievement, an achievement that is, at least,aligned with the theme of sexual difference, that is, at least, aligned withthe encountering form and time of the improvisational interview.

We must study the texts. Is the theme of sexual difference the achieve-

ment of Freudian thought? I do not know. I do not even know if Freudian

thought—or any thought there is—achieves or completes itself some-

where. And should we think sexual difference in terms of différance in

general or the inverse? I do not know. I suspect this question is badly

formulated. I cannot go on by improvising. . . .78

Derrida’s words are of (the) ensemble though he cannot, in the wake ofan ill-formed question, improvise. The question, that it might be decon-structed, must be well formed. But the music of which he dreams, thewriting to which he is drawn, bear the trace and, even, the hope ofimprovisation.79 They bear ensemble’s sound, its extension and reformu-lation, in supplemented line and clustered sentence. But Derrida wouldmove slowly and deliberately from the well-formed question even as hehears the call of the sound of Algeria; indeed he hears the distinction inthe sounds, sees the trajectory after the question as a detour, hopes,


Wnally, for something that is, somehow, both more and less than asynthesis, but mutes the improvisational quality of his philosophicaltradition. So we must study the texts in order to break the pursuit ofencountering speech that psychoanalysis ambivalently gives as a kindof impossible dream. The road twists so because inalienable speech,even inalienable accent, is given back only by way of their return. Whatone receives as a result of indirect, interminable returning to what onealready had is a language of feeling that is broached in an emotionallycharged, personal, and politico-historical insistence:

I insist on improvising. For the last two months, I have not stopped

thinking in a quasi-obsessional fashion about this, but I preferred not to

prepare what I am going to say. I think it is necessary this evening that

everyone tell us, speaking personally and after a Wrst analysis, what he or

she thinks of these things. On the other hand, I wanted to tell you what

my own feeling is.80

It’s as if at the end of philosophy, brushed all up against a range of otherphantasmatic ends—of man, of history—one returns to the dark matteror continent of philosophy’s unconscious to shed some light. Psycho-analysis is not this unconscious though it might be said to operate inthat process through which one is given back (to) what one alreadyhas, that to which one is always and never returning. This unconscious,or, more precisely, this thing of darkness that philosophy has seemedincapable of acknowledging as its own, is improvisation. By brieXy andinadequately tracing the trajectory of this disappearing bridge or dema-terialized romance in Derrida’s phonography (the “discography,” if youwill, of his recorded speech), one sees how even in the most radical—which might, in this case, be taken to mean the blackest—of philoso-phers improvisation remains a problem, the problem of feeling. This isthe question concerning philosophy’s color line. How does it feel to bethe problem of feeling? Derrida’s brilliance lies precisely in his sound-ing of that question.81


On the other hand, in certain circles, broken romance, the dangers ofunbroken romance always about to be broken and re-en-gendering, andbroken speech have always been understood—though this understand-ing has never been peaceful—as the constituting intoxication of themost radical political and aesthetic reason. Here are the multiple cov-ers(-without-origin) of another phonographed encounter:

Mingus’ solo is subtle and yet strongly assertive. Dolphy’s bass clarinet

continues the free-speaking momentum of the performances until he and

Mingus engage in a conversation that should not be too difWcult to fol-

low in its literal argument. It begins with Mingus swearing at Dolphy on

the bass as a similar musical conversation actually did begin on the stand

of the Showplace several months before. The conversations gathered in

intensity when Dolphy said he was going to leave the band and continued

in this piece night after night. On the record Mingus again criticizes

Dolphy for leaving; but Dolphy explains why he has to, urgently asks

Mingus to understand, and at last Mingus does. The Wnal return to the

melody is, therefore, resigned—and leads to the quick goodbye.82

The importance of communicativeness and the ability to hear is

underscored by another type of language metaphor used by musicians: “to

say” or “to talk” often substitutes for “to play.” In explaining what Tony

Williams plays for a ride cymbal beat, Michael Carvin stated:

That wasn’t the limb keeping time . . . Tony would say [see musi-

cal example 9 in Carvin’s chapter 2], but his foot was talking about

[straight quarters].

Aesthetic evaluations frequently include this usage. To suggest that a

soloist “isn’t saying anything” is an insult; conversely, to say that he or she

“makes that horn talk” is very high praise. The perception of musical

ideas as a communicative medium in and of themselves can be most effec-

tively understood against the background of aural recognition of elements

of musical tradition. . . . A secondary meaning of the talking horn image

relates to the ability of the horn players to mimic a vocal quality through


articulation, attack, and timbre. A very literal imitation of arguing voices

can be heard on Charles Mingus’s “What Love” (1960). Eric Dolphy on

bass clarinet and Mingus on bass sound as though they are having a very

intense verbal argument. The musical image of the talking horn personi-

Wes the horn, once again refusing to separate the sound from the person

who makes it.83

I don’t want to fall in love with anybody in the business because—because,

well, a situation like this. Fall in love with George Tucker and Joe Farrell

and they’re gone. See, so you can’t fall in love with them, but you can

enjoy playing with them and reaching [musical] excitement with them. . . .

Oh, you’re getting me into some heavy, heavy stuff. . . . That’s one of the

main reasons why after these guys passed away—Eric [Dolphy], Booker

Ervin, Joe Farrell, George Tucker, and a drummer named J. C. Moses . . .

All these guys are tremendous musicians, and we had a ball playing with

each other, you know. Now when I hear that, I say “Oh, I feel so sad that

he’s gone.” But he did document this, thank the powers for electricity.84

__________17. VII. 82

Dear Angel of Dust

The balloons are words taken out of our mouths, an eruptive

critique of predication’s rickety spin rewound as endowment. They sub-

sist, if not on excision, on exhaust, abstract-extrapolative strenuousness,

tenuity, technical-ecstatic duress. They advance the exponential potency

of dubbed excision—plexed, parallactic articulacy, vexed elevation, vatic

vacuity, giddy stilt. They speak of overblown hope, loss’s learned aspira-

tion, the eventuality of seen-said formula, Wlled-in equation, vocative

imprint, prophylactic bluff. They raise hopes while striking an otherwise

cautionary note, warnings having to do with empty authority, habitable

indent, housed as well as unhoused vacuity, fecund recess.

The balloons are love’s exponential debris, “high would’s” atmos-

pheric dispatch. Hyperbolic aubade (love’s post-expectant farewell), they

arise from the depth we invest in ordeal, chivalric trauma—depth charge


and buoy rolled into one. They advance an exchange adumbrating the

advent of optic utterance, seen-said exogamous mix of which the coupling

of tryst and trial would bear the inaugural brunt. Like Djeannine’s loga-

rithmic Xute, they obey, in the most graphic imaginable fashion, ocular

deWcit’s oracular ricochet, seen-said remit.

The balloons are thrown-away baggage, oddly sonic survival,

sound and sight rolled into one. They map even as they mourn post-

appropriative precincts, chthonic or subaquatic residua come to the

surface caroling world collapse. They dredge vestiges of premature post-

expectancy (overblown arrival, overblown goodbye), seen-said belief’s

wooed risk of inXation, synaesthetic excess, erotic-elegiac behest. The

balloons augur—or, put more modestly, acknowledge—the ascendancy of

videotic premises (autoerotic tube, autoerotic test pattern), automatic

stigmata bruited as though of the air itself.

Such, at least, was the insistence I heard coming out of Dolphy’s

horn. “The Madrig Speaks, the Panther Walks” was the cut. I sat down

to listen to it only minutes ago and found myself writing what you’ve just

read. Never had Eric’s alto sounded so precocious and multiply-tongued,

never so Wlled with foreboding yet buoyant all the same, walk (panther)

and talk (madrig) never so disarmingly entwined.

Listening, more deeply than ever, bone-deep, I knew the balloons

were evanescent essence, Xeet seen-said equivalence, Xighty identity, sigil,

sigh. This was the horn’s bone-deep indenture, wedge and decipherment

rolled into one. This could only, I knew, be the very thing whose name I’d

long known albeit not yet found its Wt, the very thing which, long before

I knew it as I now know it, I knew by name—the name of a new piece I’d

write if I could.

What I wouldn’t give, that is, to compose a piece I could rightly

call “Dolphic Oracle.” It would indeed ally song (madrig) with speech,

as well as with catlike muscularity and sinew—but also with catlike,

post-expectant tread, oxymoronically catlike post-expectant prowl, post-

expectant pounce, an aroused, heretofore unheard of, hopefully seen-said

panther-python mix . . .

Yours,

N. 85


when you hear music

after it’s over

it’s gone

in the air

you can never

capture it again86

What’s it mean to speak of the literal here? Nat Hentoff is attuned tothe shattered erotics of the situation and this is cool to the extent thatit links the sound of the horn and bass—shriek and boom—to ancientdepartures. But the imposition of a literal meaning seems problematicgiven the uninterpretable status of such ruptural aesthesis. The point,however, is that some voices are here, even and especially within a dis-cursive frame that asserts the propositionality of the instruments.

Dolphy’s syntax, yes, but also that even in his outness he insistedupon some reference to the chord, that in his mind there was an in-sistence of the chord, that it had been there and remained in its irrup-tion. So that an analytic of phrasing is required in order to hear musicafter it’s over. After its performance is over is when music is heard. Airreturned to air, aspire, expire. Music lies before and up ahead of its per-formance as subsistence, persistence, lingering, and sounded remainderin the breach, in the movement, from and between. The recording isthe remainder as well as the rupture, where rapturous sounds stay evenin the declaration of their inevitable disappearance, like words. There isno performance in the absence of the recording.

Rigorously un/captured, captured but you can’t capture it again,heard after the fact of its disappearance, the music—organization in theimprovisation of principles, nonexclusion of sound in the improvisation(through the relation and opposition of the generation and subversion)of meaning—lies before us. “‘The Madrig Speaks, the Panther Walks’was the cut. I sat down to listen to it only minutes ago and found myselfwriting what you just read”/“The mere recurrence to those songs, evennow, afXicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression offeeling has already found its way down my cheek.”87


When Dolphy died he was preparing himself to play with CecilTaylor, that necessary submergence. You wonder how to play withouta bridge, how to navigate what is no longer song but carries song, todo your thang underwater, bone-deep in the deep of bones, ghost-shiprisen sunken ark of bones, out and cut of the (radically excluded middle)passage. You’ve got to move from the extended interruption of the un-bridged, the chance of the synaesthetic and what it marks and unmarksin the cut, what it leaves and opens to the senses like a subject brokenand abundant in some kitchen, Weld, or studio of representation, ofsecuring and capturing: but the descent beckons toward a rewinding ofinvention, of (the hope of ) composition, of positing, of contrivance anddisclosure—of the condition of possibility of predication. Beneath thesurface of the waters of nothing but interstice “I might have committedan action,” might have acted out in group formation, neither inventionnor securing, neither composition nor predication, neither constitu-tion nor performance, of the Real, of the whole, outside, public in theorchestration of every uncapturable and long-awaited letter. Mean-while, I work my way back to come upon some black performances byway of the effects (texts/recordings) that mark their ongoing productionand invention, the improvisation of ensemble.

So that an analytic of phrasing is required in order to read unwrit-ten lines and these pauses from and between: a/ cut spiritb/ Xoating warning and submerged peril (buoy, depth charge/savingpower, danger)

“in lovely blue”c/ hope and misunderstanding (the interruption or modular-

ization that is caution)d/ . . . rigorous enrapture

(the eruptive critique of the ascribed become the appre-hended, the created become the discovered). Doubleness of invention.Complexities of before. Slice.

Writing, expression, rolls: the cut, recording, the remainder, andthe rupture in which rapturous sounds (words) remain, disseminate,mark, and stain even in declarations of their necessary disappearance.


What I wouldn’t give to speak of, not speak for, speak from, what Iwouldn’t give to compose, invent (in the place of “discover” hear “comeupon”) that which has been come upon, doubleness of invention, toascribe what has been apprehended, captured, secured, you cannot cap-ture it again. What I wouldn’t do, if I ever thought I’d lose you.

You better know that the bridge collapsed. Don’t just enter themusic, but descend into its depths. A bone-deep listening, a sensing ofthe unbridgeable chasm, seen-said, seen cry unheard but for that bone-deep listening, improvisational vision of invisible performance, thatdescent into the music, descent into organization, the ensemble of thesenses, unexcluded in the cut, excision of the unit, out in the ensemble,in preparation of the necessary sound. From a double anchor to anchor-lessness, from anchorless Xoating to weighted descent, the descentbeckons, the fall no mere suspension, no rickety or rackety oscillation ifthe bridge is out and the cut beckons, beckoning of the “rolled-into-one,” of the “seen-said,” the “post-expectant,” an insistence as insistentpreviousness, like the insisted upon in-sists of Lacan, like some “speciWcprematurity of birth” as the Weld of play or troubled depths of a “phy-logenetic heritage,” the extended interruption of the unbridged, thechance of the synaesthetic and what it marks and unmarks in the cut,what it leaves and opens to the senses. “[E]ruptive critique of predica-tion’s rickety spin,” of the attribution of properties to the subject, ofrepresentation, of securing and capturing: but the descent beckonstoward a rewinding of invention, of (the hope of/for) composition, ofpositing, of contrivance and disclosure—of the condition of possibilityof predication. Maybe hope is always overblown, but the overblown pro-duces unprecedented sound, overtones of the heretofore unheard (of ),laughter outside the house, “unhoused vacuity”; nevertheless, hope isnot quite on the bridge. The rackety bridge collapsed under the weightof its own unsustainable oscillation, vibrations that are too demand-ing. Hope is in the beckoning of descent, where what is made possiblein the synaesthetic is not undermined by its totalizing excess, by whatexceeds or is excised or is excluded in any such totalization, by what timestill leaves out, by how time still takes you out from what’s collected in


“premature post-expectancy,” otherwise known as mourning. To recordthis insight is an Ellisonian imperative: not just an impossible andimpolitic staving off of invisibility, which after all has hypervisibility atits heart; rather, in the hope of an ensemble of the senses and, after thefact of its ongoing deferral, an emergence of radical orchestration. Youdescend into the depths of the music and linger there, dancing in thehoped-for shadow of a bridge, unfathomable ocean song, uncrossableriver suite, sentimental avant-garde, subjunctive-sentimental mood. Thisis an Ellingtonian imperative.


Tragedy, Elegy

Amiri Baraka’s work is in the break, in the scene, in the music.1 Thislocation, at once internal and interstitial, determines the character ofBaraka’s political and aesthetic intervention. Syncopation, performance,and the anarchic organization of phonic substance delineate an onto-logical Weld wherein black radicalism is set to work, and in the earlysixties Baraka is situated—ambivalently, shiftingly, reticently—at theopening of that Weld. His work is also situated as the opening of thatWeld, as part of a critique immanent to the black radical tradition thatconstitutes its radicalism as a cutting and abundant refusal of closure.This refusal of closure is not a rejection but an ongoing and recon-structive improvisation of ensemble; this reconstruction’s motive is thesexual differentiation of sexual difference. The trajectory of Baraka’swork in this period moves from the resistant embrace to the repressivetransfer of this motive, and that trajectory is often discernible withinindividual works that emerge all along that trajectory. I want to tracethis movement in the interest of amplifying the work’s radical forcewhile recognizing that this desire goes against the grain of Baraka’s ownassessment of the period I describe. What he sees as a transitional phaseof his development—ground simply to have been covered or passedthrough—is a very deWnite seizure and advent, a musical caesura thatdemands precisely that immersive lingering that, according to RalphEllison, is a necessary preface to action.

C H A P T E R 2

In the Break

85

As in Ellison, the occasion for such lingering is the entrance intothat scene where the question of being and the question of black-ness converge. As in Ellison, they converge as sexual questions. As inEllison, they require a politico-economic response. This convergenceis, of course, a point of divergence between Ellison and Baraka. Theydiverge precisely by way of the Wgure of transition, development. Barakawould say that Ellison moves through nationalism and Marxism to adevolutionary aesthetic individualism. Ellison would decry Baraka’smigration from precisely that aesthetic individualism to nationalist andMarxist vulgarity. The extremity of both positions is, of course, prob-lematic, but the positions remain instructive to the extent that theircrossing marks a spot. That spot is the location of the interplay betweennationalism and Marxism wherein the two are continually cut andabounded by the sexual differentiation of sexual difference. For Baraka,this spot exists between 1962 and 1966 even though neither he nor hiscommentators would characterize this moment as occurring withineither his black nationalist or Marxist-Leninist “phases.” Baraka’s lin-gering in the broken rhythms of the Weld where blackness and blackradicalism are given in and as black (musical) performance, in and asthe improvisation of ensemble, amounts to a massive intervention inand contribution to the prophetic description—a kind of anticipatoryrewriting or phonography—of communism that is, as Cedric Robinsonhas written, the essence of black radicalism. Such prophetic descriptionis the project of a sentimental, criminal, proletarian, (homo)erotic,impossibly maternal avant-garde that works by way of a disruptivedoubling of certain other theoretical hallmarks of “our modernity”as well. Attunement to the placement of these forces, of this viciousmodernity, in Baraka’s body of work, even if he would reject or disavowthem, is the opening onto an understanding of the placement of theseforces in the black radical tradition in general. This work is meant tocontribute to the aesthetic genealogy of that tradition.

Of course, such a genealogy could never be simple, and the com-plexity of Baraka’s out modernity is always on the verge of a lyricalscandal:

86 – IN THE BREAK

The wide open ensembles, the working friezes . . . the attempts at total

deWnition are exciting and beautiful. It all works. The whole music seems

less “bound” (by charts, by reading, by contracts, by spurious attentions)

than before.2

The richness of this passage lies in the fact that the “wide open ensem-bles” it invokes and extends are shadowed by the threat of closuresboth internally and externally determined. It is not a coincidence thatthe very speciWc concerns with the animative object, with performativetotality, that drive this passage are asserted at around the same time thatMartin Heidegger was moving toward the end of a long techno-anxietyover the fact of everything functioning;3 that Derrida and others weremoving in the beginning of an extended assault—driven by and inavoidance of Heidegger, among others—on the very idea of total deW-nition that, according to Philippe Sollers, for instance (updating anddiagnosing another nausea), was shaped and plotted, as if a piece ofBlack Art, against a backdrop of sound: a horn, a trumpet, whatevervoice there was or body animating it from the open music of vernacu-lar, sentimental avant-garde and appositional encounter. Now thesecan be seen as detached Euro-intellectual echoes unheard underneaththe shattered upheaval of fucked-up, funked-up, post-’65 Newark, itselfcalled into being by the actively forgetful description of a returningexile, prophetic descriptions of destruction and rebuilding, destruktionand reconstruction, deconstruire and (urban) renewal, removal, foreshad-owing descriptions of some out improvisations. But I will try to amplifythem while plotting the course of a particular trajectory of transferbetween certain musical performances and various modes of their re-production, and between different moments and strains in the history ofthat reproduction, and toward the future of that history and what itmight engender, whatever liberatory possibility it might hold and acti-vate, the drives by which it’s animated and punctuated. Part of what I’dlike to get to is whatever generative forces there are in the asymptotic,syncopated nonconvergence of event, text, and tradition. That conver-gence emerges in and as a certain glancing confrontation—of Africa,

IN THE BREAK – 87

Europe, and America, of outness, labor, and sentiment—that is bothbefore and a part of the material preface to the theoretical and practi-cal formulation of a black public sphere.

Baraka thinks the possibility of such a public montagically, musically,and at the locus of the overlapping of these Welds—mechanical repro-duction. At a certain moment in the trajectory of his career he found thework of Wittgenstein useful to his meditations. Here is a small collec-tion of Wittgenstein’s formulations by way of which we might proceed.

4.014 The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the

waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation,

which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical

structure is common.

(Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story.

They are all in a certain sense one.)

4.0141 In the fact that there is a general rule by which the musician is

able to read the symphony out of the score, and that there is a rule by

which one could reconstruct the symphony from the line on the gramo-

phone record and from this again—by means of the Wrst rule—construct

the score, herein lies the internal similarity between these things which

at Wrst sight seem to be entirely different. And the rule is the law of pro-

jection which projects the symphony into the language of the musical

score. It is the rule of the translation of this language into the language

of the gramophone record.4

5. “But doesn’t one experience meaning?” “But doesn’t one hear the

piano?” Each of these questions can be meant, i.e. used, factually or con-

ceptually. (Temporally or timelessly.)

494. Doesn’t it take imagination to hear something as a variation on a

particular theme? And yet one is perceiving something in so hearing it.5

22. Think, for example of certain involuntary interpretations that

we give to one or another passage in a piece of music. We say: This

88 – IN THE BREAK

interpretation forces itself upon us. (That is surely an experience.) And

the interpretation can be explained by purely musical relationships:—

Very well, but our purpose is not to explain, but to describe.6

I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I

see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experi-

ence “noticing an aspect.”7

783. We can say that someone doesn’t have a “musical ear,” and

“aspect-blindness” is (in a way) comparable to this sort of inability to hear.

784. The importance of the concept “aspect-blindness” lies in the

kinship of seeing an aspect and experiencing the meaning of a word. For

we want to ask: “What are you missing if you do not experience the

meaning of a word?”—If you cannot utter the word “bank” by itself,

now with one meaning, then with the other, or if you do not Wnd that

when you utter a word ten times in a row it loses its meaning, as it were,

and becomes a mere sound.8

Montage renders inoperative any simple opposition of totality tosingularity. It makes you linger in the cut between them, a generativespace that Wlls and erases itself. That space is, is the site of, ensemble: theimprovisation of singularity and totality and through their opposition.For now that space will manifest itself somewhere between the Wrst linesof tragedy and the last lines of elegy. Lingering in that space is notbut is of deconstruction, the oscillation between ghostly poles. We canbegin, perhaps; perhaps not begin but move on; naw, we can linger inand over a formulation of Derrida’s: “what is happily and tragically uni-versal is absolute singularity.”9 There, here, the “not but of” that hauntshere and there, the resonant sound and Xashing light, the emergence ofthe ensemble of the senses, dawns on us iconically, but in a way that isalways touched by, or bears the trace of, the fullness of the sign.

We could think of this dawning in many ways, by way of manyquestions. What is the use or structure of iconicity? What’s the relationbetween iconicity and that fullness of the sign (the richness that Peirce

IN THE BREAK – 89

located at the intersection of the symbolic, the iconic, and the indexi-cal) that we might call semioticity?10 What is the relation between icon-icity, semioticity, and the experience that exceeds normal conceptions oftemporality and ontology and that is, according to Stephen Mulhall,“characterized by the observer’s felt need to employ a representationwhich might otherwise refer to subjective . . . experience—to one wayof seeing the Wgure—as if it were the report of a new perception” andthat we call (after Wittgenstein) noticing an aspect or aspect-dawning oraspect-seeing or (my favorites) hearing or having a musical ear or phras-ing?11 What is the relation between this experience and the experienceof the poem? What are the internal relations within that experiencebetween the intellection of the poem’s meaning and the sensing of itsvisuality and/or aurality? What are the relations between versions of orvariations on the poem, manifestations of the eye and ear that raise thetoo deep question of the ontological status of the poem itself? What hasthis constellation to do with the phenomena of singularity and totalityand their improvisation? What has this constellation to do with tragedyand/or elegy and/or (their) improvisation? And what have all of theseto do with utopian aspiration and political despair?

Part of what I’m interested in, part of what I’d like to use inorder to orient myself, is what could be called the (or, more precisely,Wittgenstein’s) way to (or around or against) phenomenology. MorespeciWcally, I’m after the way concern with perception and cognition (ofthe things themselves) leads to the deconstruction of ontology; the waydeconstruction generates riffs and rifts, odds and ends, of philosophyand of the intersection in philosophy of semiotics and phenomenology;the way we move beyond such productive cuts and eccentric arrivalsto something more intense—like an “active forgetting” embedded inthe improvisation of the things themselves whose broadest sense and im-plications deconstruction spurns and craves. What I’m after dependsupon thinking through the question of the relation between semioticsand phenomenology by way of the phenomenon or experience of noticingan aspect (which is, I think we can say, again after Wittgenstein, the

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experience of meaning or of an insistent interpretation). It will be well,here, to remember a (para)phrase (’cause every phrase is a paraphrase)of Wittgenstein’s—there is no phenomenology, only phenomenologicalproblems—and to notice in passing that noticing an aspect—a phe-nomenological problem that, as we shall see, demands description in lightof its exceeding of explanation—is in the aftermath or wake of thisformulation: not but of not but of not but of

So another big part of what drives these fragments is interest inwhat is given in or emanates from the movement from the harmony ofthinking and being, thought and reality (formations from the musicsof Parmenides and Wittgenstein), to that harmony’s Wguration in signs.We could think this also as the movement from “logical structure” toiconicity and beyond. Think about logical structure or its variations,“pictorial internal relation” and/or “internal similarity”: these formu-lations of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus have an almost Peirceanring, coming as close as they do to Peirce’s notion of iconicity. InWittgenstein “logical structure” is shared between two objects (one aproposition about the other) in much the same way that for Peirce a“diagrammatic sign or icon . . . exhibits a similarity or analogy to thesubject of discourse.”12 We must keep in mind two things: (1) this sim-ilarity occurs in the context of a struggle between sight and sound or,more precisely, in an insistence of music in Wittgenstein’s visual/spatialmetaphorics; (2) Wittgenstein became increasingly dissatisWed with thenature and implications of this notion of logical structure perhaps inpart because of a certain restrictiveness embedded in the philosophicalconceptualization of the phenomenon of likeness. Indeed, phenomenon isprobably a misleading word since the strictures of likeness are bound tothe insistence of its noumenality, a noumenality marked by the resis-tance of likeness to explanation or to, more precisely, employment inthe task of explanation. Something slips through the cracks or cuts oficonicity, likeness, metaphor, such that thinking operates in the absenceof any real correspondent and translational manipulation of the con-cept of internal similarity or pictorial internal relation. In that absence

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or cut, in the space between expression and meaning or between mean-ing and reference, remains an experience of meaning that Peircean orwhat I’ll call Wrst iconicity doesn’t get to and to which Wittgensteinwould get.

The question, then, is how to describe that experience, and boundup in this question is the assumption (pointed to above, bitten offWittgenstein) that description, rather than explanation, is the task withwhich we must now be concerned. More precisely, we must attempt adescription of an experience whose provenance or emergence is notreducible to logical structure, pictorial internal relation or internalsimilarity; it is an experience of the passage or cut that cannot beexplained because those formulations upon which our explanations mustbe grounded—spooky actions at a distance; communication betweenspace-time separated entities; rigid, naturalized, but anti-phenomenalsamenesses—are themselves so profoundly without ground. Like thestrange correspondence between distant particles, like the mysteriesof communication with the dead (or with tradition), the paradoxicallyelective and imperative afWnities of and within ensemble are to bedescribed within a radical improvisation of the very idea of description(in and through its relation to explanation), one that would move usfrom hidden and ontologically Wxed likeness to the anarchization ofvariation, variation not (on) but of—and thus with(out[-from-the-out-side])—a theme. At the constellation of meaning, understanding, music,phrase, feeling, variation, and imagination, we might speak again oficonicity, a second iconicity, not as the signiWcation of shared logicalstructure but as a kind of noticing of an aspect, one that allows a tem-poral as well as ontological sense, a sense outside the temporal and theontological, where we see—both factually and conceptually, staticallyand transitionally—entity and variation, each without theme. Perhapsthis second iconicity, this semioticity or fullness of the sign, is themechanism through which ensemble is made available to us as phenom-ena. Perhaps it is the supplement of description that allows description;for description of the phenomenon or experience of ensemble is onlyadequate if it is also itself the phenomenon or experience of ensemble.

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Now, if you allow me to present some axioms in the context of animprecise but necessary conXation of the philosophy of the end of philosophy (ofwhich phenomenology is not just one element among others) with modernismand with Enlightenment; and if you allow me to suggest the shadow of a par-allel declension, trajectories whose essential points are passed through in a silenceonly the occasion justiWes; then I’d trace the genealogy of iconicity from Platothrough Peirce through Wittgenstein: from a representational formulation ofeikon as likeness or image—the spectral, phantomic emanation of some absentessence that places us in the systemic epistemological and ontological oscillationbetween sameness and difference; through the semiotic structuration of a systemof likenesses that subsumes questions of difference and absence in a pragmaticconsideration of our absolute remoteness from the noumenal; through, Wnally,the reconsideration of the spooky dynamism of objects that attempts to vali-date what could be called “the changes” that an object ( for instance, the jazzensemble and its sound or the poem and its sound or their interinanimationand political implications) enacts and demands. By paying particular attentionto the “grammar” and metaphorics of Wittgenstein’s formulations on noticingaspects, keeping always in mind the necessary and, if you will, cinematicallyholistic logical form of his texts (the interplay of the aphorism and its collec-tion), we might begin to experience and describe the organization of things:(1) there’s something tragic about the end (of philosophy); (2) Barakais in the tradition of that end continually played out, played outside likea “vicious (rather than post-) modernism”; (3) the tragic in Baraka ispolitical despair.

Have you ever suffered from political despair, from despair aboutthe organization of things? What does it mean to suffer from politicaldespair when your identity is bound up with utopian political aspirationsand desires? How is identity reconWgured in the absence or betrayal ofthose aspirations? What’s the relation between political despair andmourning? In the face of the problem this constellation of questionsforms, what is required is an anarchization of certain principles so thatan improvisation of Enlightenment might become possible. The unsay-able claims of black utopian political desire, an unrequited love imagedafter the fact, its sexuality violently reconWgured (and this is in and

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shapes the tradition, the phantasmagoric image/desire/fear on both sidesof the raping of the daughter) is posited: what happens to that desire—and the identity that goes along with it—when faith is lost, when prayeris no longer possible or is unheard over the beautiful, screaming, frac-tured music that precedes it? What happens when the improvisationof Enlightenment or modernism or (the philosophy of ) (the end of )philosophy—as predicated on the eradication of a certain obsessionwith differentiated, representative, and representational identity—islost? What chance does music, the music of the poem, the music thatprompts the poem, the music that is prompted by the poem, give us toarrive at such an improvisation? How is such an improvisation to berecalled if its source grows more and more remote, separated from usby the death, by the distance, of Miles?13

The tragic in any tradition, especially the black radical tradition,is never wholly abstract. It is always in relation to quite particular andmaterial loss. This is what “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS” is about:the absence, the irrecoverability of an originary and constitutive event;the impossibility of a return to an African, the impossibility of an arrivalat an American, home. “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS” is a responseto political homelessness and this is the sense in which it is tragic; andthis is also why Baraka, between 1962 and 1966, became America’s greattragic poet by way of an improvisation through the opposition of theexistential and the political, which extends and improves, say, the for-mulations of “Sartre, a white man.”14

The tragic political despair of “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS”is a function of the weakness of its relation to ensemble and to ensem-ble’s condition of possibility, improvisation. Perhaps we’ll come tounderstand tragedy as an absence of light (Lichtüng or Aufklärung) andbreath (Geist, anima), the nothing that does not come to stand againstthem (or, more precisely, their efWgies). If so, that understanding willhave only been possible by way of the activation of the trace of impro-visation and ensemble that, though dormant, is in the poem always andeverywhere like the spirit of elegy, like every bit of what “the spirit ofelegy” means.

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Here are the Wrst lines of tragedy.

Against what lightis false what breath

sucked, for deadness.15

Slippage from question to assertion: question concerning absence,nothing, the hope or trace of what is not there that would stand against,that could never fully stand against, light and breath and the constella-tion of their meanings and associations, most especially, Enlightenment,revelation, spirit, song, and the vast and paradoxical network of libera-tory and oppressive political implications they contain, reduced here,despairingly, in negative assertion, to the false and the dead. The intel-lect demands an analog—in the absence of symmetry between form andcontent, in the absence of what might be called a kind of iconicity (whatI’ve referred to as Wrst iconicity, a conXation of likeness and pictorialinternal relation: perhaps that absence of symmetry or iconicity is whatI referred to earlier as a kind of dormancy)—to the visual and aural toolsa poetic reading can bring to bear on the changes Baraka plays: fromquestion to assertion, from line to line (spatial reorientations), fromsight to sound.16 The recording, as such and here, brings a whole otherensemble of changes, versions and their slippages, noticings of aspectsor improvisations, through the opposition or conXation of objectiveand subjective experience by way of modes of variation that are orga-nized within another understanding of poem or theme and withoutground such that “the paradoxical air deWnitive of aspect-dawning expe-riences—the paradox manifest in our saying of a Wgure we know to beunchanged: ‘Before I saw something else, but now I see a [rabbit].’”—must be heard again in the light, if you will, of a description of a phe-nomenon that philosophy will have not quite been ready for: the impro-visation through the opposition of stasis and dynamism, object andexperience of the object.17 This is the paradoxical and deWnitive air ofan accompaniment and it allows us to say that the poem—which is tosay the music, the ensemble marked by the interinanimation of poem

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and music among everything else in Baraka’s work—“refreshes life” sothat this phenomenon (something akin to but more than what WallaceStevens calls “the Wrst idea”) is given us.

Perhaps all we know is that in the absence of what stands against,in the absence that is the dead and false, a poem is generated. It repre-sents these absences, projecting into the future of their structures andeffects from which, it would appear, only a god can save us.18 But a poemis generated, like a transcendental clue for that in which faith has beenlost. Think of Baraka’s sound as the sound of a belief in the dialectic:that sound extends a powerful strain in the African American traditionthat desperately holds to utopian (re)visions of Enlightenment formu-lations of universality and freedom. But in and after the fact of the real-ization that these things are not for us comes the chance of a tragedy.When that hold is loosened, under the pressure of catastrophic anddurative loss, a hard critique like a multiphonic scream or “slide awayfrom the proposed”—from the propositions encoded in the philosoph-ical instrument that sounds your death and birth and death and birth—is opened.19 At the point where and when all you can do is appeal to “alost god damballah” to “rest or save us against the murders we intend,”something else kicks in against all the determinations of freedom; alived, sounded philosophical lingering in the cut between the dangers andsaving powers of (the refusals of ) totality and singularity; an improvi-sation of (the) ensemble. Then, here, we ask: what if we let the music(no reduction to the aural, no mere addition of the visual but a radicalnonexclusion of the ensemble of the senses such that music becomes amode of organization in which principles dawn) take us?

And don’t let any artiWcial hierarchy of the senses keep you fromthe mysterious holoesthetic experience of ensemble Baraka’s poemsapproach. One must have an ear and eye, skin and tongue, to perceivethe poems’ publication, aural reproduction, and their effects. We see thepoem, read it, hear it, feel it—is it, in the midst of these various experi-ences, the same? Does it change? Where is the poem? Is the entirety ofthe poem ever present to us in any of its manifestations?

The relation between a musical score and the music is like therelation between the page and the poem. That which appears on the

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page is not the poem but a visual-spatial representation of the poemthat would approximate or indicate its sound and meaning, form andcontent, and the particular sculpted manifestation of language as theirinterinanimations, the orchestration or arrangement of the body: voiceand eye, the instrument upon which that music is played, the locus ofthe senses that must, in the face of all pressure, not allow itself to bereduced either to eye or voice and that must not allow the occlusion ofthe other senses and the correspondent exclusions that would follow.

So the spatial representation, the visual-ritual embodiment ofthe poem on the page, is supposed to indicate how it sounds, how yousound. But does it? Can it? Do the visual/spatial/ritual enactment orpositioning or dance on the page of “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS”adequately indicate how it’s supposed to sound, thus sanctioning thecommerce between eye and ear through which we must go in order toarrive at a description of the poem and that broader understanding ofmusic to which I just referred and that notion of politics for whichmusic is a transcendental clue?

But it’s wrong to speak here of the poem as if it were the func-tion of relation, of some determined mode of interaction between ele-ments—rather, we might want to think of the poem as the entire Weldor saturation, Xood or plain, within which the page, sound and mean-ing, the live, the original, the recording, the score exist as icons orsingular aspects of a totality that is, itself, iconic of totality as such.Would this happily tragic formation, the mark, for Derrida, of “thisstrange institution called literature” of which nothing can be said, beadequate to the music that emanates from that peculiar institutionwhereof everything, all, the whole, ensemble, remains to be said andwhose trace is the object of an unnamed seer/singer/sayer’s deepestpolitical desire?

Let’s return for a minute to Wittgenstein’s metaphorics. Notic-ing an aspect was, for Wittgenstein, a holoesthetic phenomenon orexperience: not to be described by way of a exclusive reference to thevisual-spatial but by reference to the aural as well. Thus the ability tonotice aspects is (like) having a musical ear. Thus noticing an aspect iswhat I have been calling second iconicity, though semioticity, again,

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might be a better term because a kind of holism is implied, one thatwould correspond to that fullness or richness of the semiotic in whichPeirce was interested and to which I earlier referred. Wittgenstein’swork gets us to the point at which it is no longer possible to deny thatsemioticity is an object of the philosophy of psychology; he also gets uspast that point to the extent that his work, part of the philosophy of phi-losophy’s end, must also think the end of the philosophy of psychology.Finally, semioticity is nothing more than the ability to experience, under-stand, describe, generate, imagine, improvise, ensemble. It is not a kindof totalistic substitute or cipher for individuality or singularity; it israther the mechanism by way of which we understand singularity andtotality to be phenomena within the larger phenomenon of ensemble.

I want to think of this in much the same way Bakhtin thinks ofthe novel: as a force that reveals the limits of a systemic mode ofthought, namely, that thinking in the spirit of system that has hereto-fore been called metaphysics, that thinking of the whole that is continu-ally interrupted by temporal and ontological differentiation.20 I want toshow the novel, the new, the improvisational, at work in ensemble—which is to say in music, in utopian desire, in institutions strange andpeculiar, and in their echoes and aftermaths, deconstructions and recon-structions—through both the despair of tragedy and the joy of (elegiac)resurrection.

Elegy is related to tragedy to the extent that it mourns for that whichis the condition of possibility of the tragic: (a desire for) home. Butwhat is the relation between tragedy, elegy, and improvisation? Perhapsthis: that what animates the tragic-elegiac is something more thanhome(lessness) and (the absence of ) singularity and totality: perhapsalso there is a certain constellation that exceeds them, that exceeds thestructure of their oscillation between happiness and despair, resurrec-tion and mourning. What I’m talking about is ensemble and the im-provisation that allows us to experience and describe it. It is our accessto “the sexual cut,” that “insistent previousness evading each and everynatal occasion,” and it allows us to move beyond either the simple

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evasion of the abyss or the spatio-temporal discontinuity that impedesour direction (home) or the narcotic belief in some spectral reemergencefrom its depths: rather we might look at that temporal-spatial disconti-nuity as a generative break, one wherein action becomes possible, onein which it is our duty to linger in the name of ensemble and its perfor-mance. That break allows, indeed demands, a fundamental reorientationthat we might call novelty, that always exists at the heart of tragedy andelegy, which is there in Baraka’s poetry and is there as that poetry wouldenact—through the opposition of description and explanation—the freemusic and politics, the free mode of organization it moves within andpoints to and whose logical structure it shares. Such enactment occursby way of an improvisation through the very idea of logical structurein a way that is way past any normal ontology or time: so that whatI’m into here is the anarchronic improvisation of ensemble that existsin the tragic and elegiac Baraka. Part of what one might say, then,about singularity is that it is tragic and that it always points to a kind ofdespair or inevitability or to an endless dialectical struggle with despairas inevitability; to remain within its grasp requires a powerful faith inresurrection, ghosts, spirits, specters, a powerful faith in the possibilityof some mystical and therefore totalizing force rising from the abyssthat blocks any notion of continuity, fate, destiny, any notion, morespeciWcally, of progress or perfectibility. You must have faith, in short,in some animus that allows the continual projection of discontinuity,the persistence of a certain structure of life in which Wnal judgment—inwhich justice—is always deferred, to come, up ahead. Thus we can saythat totality is elegiac; that in some sense elegy is the necessary reactionto the tragic state of affairs that singularity imposes: singularity alwaysimplies an end, a break, a radical interruption. Elegy is the response tothat interruption, it is the mechanism by which hopelessly fragile singu-larity, after the fact of the inevitable end it is and brings, is regeneratedin the form of a call to the spirit of a totality that is no longer, thathas perhaps never been, one. The elegiac response to the end that isof singularity is the invocation of totality’s ghost.

If Wrst iconicity is the idea of logical structure that grounds the

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relations between tragedy and elegy, singularity and totality—and is thatwhich keeps the time of their rhythmic, deconstructive, timeless oscil-lation—then second iconicity offers an improvisation of that structureand through its effects. That second iconicity—noticing an aspect—thatwe must transform Wrst into a less exclusionary semioticity and Wnallyinto a more radical, out-from-the-outside improvisation, is all through-out Baraka and resides especially in the cut between the beginning of“BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS” and the end of a piece we’ll arrive atmomentarily, “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” a cut that is Wlled,erased, by our lingering in what animates it. That lingering, of course,would be musical. The passage I’d like to take you to is music. “SoWhat?” you might ask . . .

“So What,” the most famous tune from Miles Davis’s most cele-brated album, Kind of Blue, is in that it changes both from the point ofview of the observer/listener and by way of the actions of the ensemblesthat generate it. Its paradoxical, anti-ontological status is a function ofa form that de-emphasizes harmonic variation—the dominant “gram-mar” of jazz improvisation from Armstrong to bebop—by focusing onmovement between tonalities, thereby allowing music to be generatedout of the heretofore unthought locus of a multiply centered or decen-tered structure, namely, modal composition/improvisation. Though“Milestones,” a 1958 cut from Miles Davis’s album of the same name,and Eddie Harris’s “Freedom Jazz Dance,” a tune recorded by Davisfor his 1966 album Miles Smiles, are most often cited as the Wrst experi-ments in this new form of jazz composition, “So What” (1959) marksthe full emergence of the era of modal improvisation in jazz and isconsidered “the modal composition par excellence,” the bridge linkingand separating the severe stricture’s of bebop’s harmonically basedimprovisational model to the more melodic, even anarchic, reconstruc-tions of or improvisations through the song form itself that the musicknown as free jazz enacts.21

“So What” deWes the opposition between object and experienceupon which Wittgenstein relies both in his Wrst and second reconWgu-rations of iconicity. Neither the kind of likeness that would be explained

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by way of the idea of logical structure or pictorial internal relation northe kind of likeness that would be described by way of reference tonoticing aspects are evident in “So What” (i.e., in the “internal rela-tions” that exist between the theme- or song-as-object and its varia-tions, either as perceived by an observer, enacted by a participant inits making or interpreted by some reverentially reconstructive artist orcritic). Indeed, and as I have tried to point out earlier with regard tosome of the other things we’ve examined here, the opposition betweentheme and variation is no longer operative after the fact of the music’sorganization and the residual effects of that organization, across vari-ous disciplinary and/or cultural boundaries marking domains that werenever, in their own right, devoid of the improvisational motion whichThe Music celebrates and philosophy represses. We can see Wittgen-stein’s second iconicity, his noticing of aspects and valorization ofdescription, as an attempt to repress that improvisational motion evenas it also would embrace it, even as the aphoristic and deeply improvi-sational form of Wittgenstein’s work embodies it (as any reading of hiswork suggests; as Monk’s—Ray’s not Thelonius’s [though you know that“Light Blue” was the story of both their lives, Thelonius Sphere’s andLudwig’s I mean]—biography of him moves to conWrm).22

“So What” is reducible neither to its near nonexistent score norto some imaginarily deWnitive initial recording nor to any other of themyriad renditions of this improvisation that Miles’s ensembles playedalmost every night, coincidentally, during the years of what I temporar-ily call Baraka’s tragic period.23 So that “So What” is the unheard musicthat is the background (and here I mean something like a Searleanbackground—[a production of ] the ensemble or “set of nonrepresenta-tional . . . capacities that enable all representing to take place”) oftragedy returning by way of the rough echo of its name in elegy.24 It isan object whose objectivity is in that it transforms; it is what Stevenswould call, if he could ever have recognized it, in a phrase more precisethan the one (“the Wrst idea”) I echo above, “a supreme Wction”: abstract,pleasure-giving, changing, yet material enough to bear the exultantmournfulness of the blues, the high and essential pleasure of repetition

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encoded in all the possible experiences of meaning that the soundand title offer us, the inWnity of whatever follows the absent loss thatthe title implies, absent loss paralleling the absence that would standagainst that other manifestation of itself with which “BLACK DADANIHILISMUS” begins, echoing what comes in the aftermath of lossin an ending in which Baraka’s voice becomes Miles’s, in which voicebecomes metavoice, shadowed and deepened by mourning, moaning,growl,25 at which the textual citation only gestures:

I know the last few years I heard you and saw you dressed up all purple

and shit. It did scare me. All that loud ass rock and roll I wasn’t into most

of it, but look brother, I heard Tutu and Human Nature and D Train.

I heard you one night behind the Apollo for Q, and you was bashin like

the you we knew, when you used to stand coiled like a blue note and play

everything the world meant, and be in charge of the shit too. I’ll always

remember you like that Miles, and yr million children will too. With that

messed up poppa stoppa voice, I know you looken up right now and say

(growl) So What?26

That growl bears the trace of what I would imagine of each manifesta-tion in these poems of joy and pain. Don’t describe. Don’t explain.

The Dark Lady and the Sexual Cut

Leon Forrest refers (soon after the cutting auto-interruption of hisown text’s beginning, the one in which he calls himself out for beingunfaithful to the literary muse, seduced by Lady, by music, by whatabounds the literary in the sounded word, by what he then would denyby surrendering to the lyric, by having Lady so surrender, by invokingthe literary as a category for her work) to the story in Lady Sings theBlues regarding Billie Holiday’s one-time husband Jimmy Monroe andthe origins of the song “Don’t Explain.”27

One of the songs I wrote and recorded has my marriage to Jimmy

Monroe written all over it. I guess I always knew what I was letting myself


in for when he married me. I knew this beautiful white English girl was

still in town. He didn’t admit it, of course. But I knew. One night he came

in with lipstick on his collar. Mom had moved to the Bronx then, and we

were staying there when we were in New York.

I saw the lipstick. He saw I saw it and he started explaining and

explaining. I could stand anything but that. Lying to me was worse than

anything he could have done with any bitch. I cut him off, just like that.

“Take a bath, man,” I said. “Don’t explain.”

That should have been the end of it. But that night stuck in my

crop. I couldn’t forget it. The words “don’t explain, don’t explain,” kept

going through my damn head. I had to get it out of my system some way,

I guess. The more I thought about it, it changed from an ugly scene to a

sad song.28

There’s a record in which Gilbert Millstein recites these ghost-written,haunted words before “Don’t Explain” is performed by Lady Day.29

What’s the status of such reading? Forrest might try to claim that hehas all along thought Billie’s singing as a reading, of romance, let’s say,or romance’s distantiation, and that what she reveals at the microphoneis revealed in just such a reading of “Don’t Explain.” On the other hand,here Forrest offers a reading of her writing as a kind of reading sincesomebody tells the story of the song’s provenance in the autobiography.In this case another augmentation interrupts when Millstein deliversthis celebrated passage from the downstage shadows at Carnegie Hall.Was Forrest listening to this reading, a reading both by Billie and of herand neither of these? Did he work in the midst of such a free, incalcu-lable transfer?

What’s it mean to speak of her “wisdom-cutting literature”?30 Thelaugh ain’t funny. She cuts literature like St. Theresa, with mutenessand grain. Is muteness an attribute of wordlessness or of the word? Tomute, to distort, augment or abound, divide or add to the sound, to theinstrument’s range, breaking the signiWer’s logic, very softly right upagainst the microphone. What does it mean to surrender to the lyric?It’s not only an abstract reaching, this going for, this willingness to fail.


Something is reached for, an unprecedented communication (cuts liter-ature, literature is cut and cuts) possible only when language is notreducible to a means of communication, when the sounded word is notreducible to linguistic meaning. “Billie just mesmerizes the English lan-guage, that’s how exacting she was.”31 What about this intoxication?Who’s afraid? Whose suffocated desire? They act out arrestment. Suchheld breathing, abrupt cancellation. Billie Holiday sings at the locus ofa massive transference; the (literary) interpretation of Billie Holidayoperates as a massive acting out. She resists such interpretation, is con-stantly reversing and interrupting such analytic situations, offering andtaking back that mastery, Wnally reaching radically around it. Therefore,motherfuckers are scared. Got to domesticate or explain the grainedvoice. Got to keep that strange—keeping shit under wraps even thoughit always echoes. But why is her lipstick ingrained on your temple?32 Shewrote on it, “know your self!” Check yourself in the midst of an expla-nation that could only reveal the trace of what can’t be explained—bothin the actions of a dark lady and in her grained voice. Don’t explainwhat they already know. She didn’t seduce you. You played yourself.The grained voice engrains, the sign of the mouth, which is the birth,the sign of a kiss, reading you like an analyst reads the signs; here thatreversal, where the listener oscillates between the analytic positions, isnow such that the listener is without knowledge and waiting on Ladyto lecture, to free-associate. So Lady interprets. She reads. But what shereads exceeds and undermines any coercive anticipatory idea; it’s notall about the regime of love within which Forrest operates, reanimatinghis authorship to a large ensemble. He imagines her reading what healready knows, but her wisdom, as he knows and would actively repress,cuts that wisdom. She’s on another thing, another register of desire. Andthat grained voice elsewhere resists the interpretation of the audiencewhen the analytic positions are exchanged. This imaginary kiss marksa voice that resists reading and writing when the audible is forgotten inthe interest of a repetition of suffocated desire and lost object, of trans-ference and drive, that would tell the audience what they want to hearand what they already know. But this is the site of a self-analysis in Cecil


Taylor’s sense of the term: an improvisation, an abundant internal trans-ference, a drunken, doubly sexual cut. When the narrator and the inter-preter enter the text and when the ghostwriter haunts it, the conditionsfor such transference, such unprecedented analysis and communication,are optimal. These interventions or mediations allow her replicative,inaugurative power. Muted, mutated, bent; muting, mutating, bendingthese words that are hers and before her

like now, as Billie reads, at the microphone

she comes in a bit tooquickly after Millstein’s strange recitation before his beat, in interrup-tion or too-quick cessation of his rhythm, established in the openingphrases of the text, establishing an implied narrative timing, that of theBildungsroman and its way to tragedy. We are prepared for the sorrowsof young Billie by caesurae that are meant to be hers but the rhythmthey instantiate is interrupted by the poverty and richness of the onewho lies before this instant, now at stage center, riding and bursting thegramophone right now.

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was

eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three.33

This is the ghostwritten anacrusis of an anti-slave narrative, a narrativeafter slavery, narration of the ante-slave. Carry it and start it, initiate it,an ongoing or too-long-running tale she cuts and cuts off, cutting off“her” words and their recitation by a musical abundance. “Lady Singsthe Blues” cuts Lady Sings the Blues. Beginning dissonantly, anarchroni-cally, in the interruption of a narrative we already know, in abundanceof a tragedy foretold, seen, her phrasing abounds.

Two phonographies: the violence she does to words when sing-ing is duplicated in her writing. A letter, for instance, or her book, theletter to Dufty that is without punctuation. In anticipation of somebeat, she will have sent that letter on up ahead so that it can be read, sothat she can read it, phrase it, deform it, recollect it:


When I get to New York I will read this letter for you I am at the St Clair

Hotel please write or call me Miss you love you

Billie Holiday

PS . . . Now you know why I don’t write i can’t34

One wishes for the tapes, that she would hurry up and come to NewYork so she could read this book to me, but then Millstein reads down-stage, the location of the text is downstage, the location of the text isin the phonograph. She has come to read this book to me, only some-one else stands in. The voice is present but off to the side, augmentedand divided or differed by the presence of someone else. The presenceimplied by the voice is a haunted, ghostly striation, repeating lies thatturn out to be true when they get phrased like that. The presence is aperformance starting now, resistance in transference on stage.

Resistance to imposed and repressive racial/sexual regimes andto speciWc events of repression, but further: these events, regimes, insti-tutions to which she replies are not originary; nor is this resistanceinterminable, nor can we simply say that the reply is paradoxically inau-gurative. Sometimes this resistance comes in the form of a laugh thatserves to resist both the saddest interpretation and the more differen-tiated reading of an oscillation between tragic heroine and macho slut,the turn to Miss Brown from My Man. There’s a barely suppressed laughin “My Man,” a laugh resistant in both political and psychoanalyticterms. It’s an abundant laugh that opens up by disturbing another con-vergence of Millstein’s and (her ghostwriter, William) Dufty’s rephras-ing. The very line that ends the text, that seems to solidify her positionwithin a tragic and falsely hopeful economy of dependence upon a man.Note these transfers: the performer of someone else’s lyrics and of herown becomes the composer whose intentions are rendered unavailableby others’ rephrasing; but at the point at which they would incorporatelyrics she reads, and Millstein would incorporate her own reconWguredlyric about the way she reads the lyric, the way she says “hunger” and“love,” into the always already constructed narrative of the tragic woman,


at the point of a condensation in Millstein’s reading that would reworkthe very occasion of that reading as the echo of a trauma, the only timeshe ever fainted was at Carnegie, some laughter lets you know thatthere’s another story before that one: “Tired? You bet. But all that I’llsoon forget with my man.”35 Millstein’s conclusion, converging with theconclusion of the autobiography, is opened by her, just like she inter-rupts what is initiated by the Millstein/Dufty ghosted and reghostedbeginning. She cuts Millstein and Dufty, cuts her own words by divid-ing and fulWlling and abounding them. Reading them a lecture she readseverything just like that.

Lady in Satin is the record of a wonderfully articulate body in pain. Itworks in the way, or in the Weld, of a new ethics, perhaps even a newmorality. The ancient tension between product and process, technolo-gized into a new strife between the live and the recording, is smoothedby sound that emerges from, among other things, massive loss andmassive resistance, only in order to reproduce agony as pleasure differ-ently with every listening. That tension is smoothed by a sound thatis anything but, however, so that what the sound carries has itself beenroughened, so that an irreducible pattern of wear, a disruptive and aug-mentative pattern of content, alters the surface of meaning. So that“You’ve Changed” is an iterable event of joy and pain, the extension ofan event whose instantiation ruptures origin every time.

The lady in satin uses the crack in the voice, extremity of theinstrument, willingness to fail reconWgured as a willingness to go past,though the achievement or arrival at the object is neither underminedby partiality or incompleteness nor burdened by the soft, heavy romanceof a simple fullness. The crack in the voice is an abundant loss, thestrings a romance with what she don’t need and already has. The crackis like that laugh in the voice of “My Man”—trace of some impossi-ble initial version or inaugurative incident and effect of the resistanceand excess of every intervening narrative and interpretation. Those lastrecords, when leaned into, into the depth of the grain, grain becomecrack or cut (you can lay your pen in there; upon what is this writing


before writing inscribed? what temple?), undermine any narrative of lifeand art that would smoothly move from a light business (busyness) tospare tragedy. Willingness to fail goes past; new coefWcients of freedom.

The lady in satin says come, she announces herself, before thesuppression of that call—as it coincides with the transformation of thename—in a text, by Baraka, called “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.”The call arrives like a response to some earlier cry in Baltimore, in theecho of some traveling song on the Eastern Shore, through recordings,Armstrong and Bessie Smith redoubling the echo of the work songsfrom upstairs at the house where Eleanora Fagan started listening. Inturn, Baraka responds—an open response that carries with it a tracehe’ll never lose even when response begins to turn away toward somesmooth, false interinanimations of manhood, nation, race.

And I’m interested in the concept of race. I’m interested in the open-ing of its differentiation and in the differentiation of its categorization.I’m interested in the frame, in framing, in the frame’s rupture, and in theinvention of the frame’s hidden internal corners. Such reconstructionswould mark the full ensemble of the determinations and indetermina-tions of race and the frame, their interinanimations and interruptiveencounters. Then we might step outside and laugh at a surprising rangeof things: an identiWcation of the sonnet’s subjectivity that exceedsall methodological transformation by way of a marked racialization(Shakespeare offers a critique of the arrest of the frame and its durativeyet artifactual by-product in the course of an iconic framing practice, atechnical reinvention of the frame, a restructuring of the sonnet /stanza,and its sequencing and a reformation of the subjectivity that the formand content of his sonnets demand and imply); the held line of anotherabsolute alterity, the singularity of breath’s serrated edge (in Baraka theframe is spirit—a deep, paradoxically artifactual valorization of elemen-tal and durative breath—the ongoing held within a fundamental, local,even national anima); a reduction of Wlm to an effect of an effect of thephotographic apparatus, a reduction that will also have been understoodas a kind of racialization (Eisenstein gives us the spirit of the frame,


which would have been outside, the originary dynamics of relation). Atthe place where Shakespeare, Baraka, and Eisenstein do not meet, not inbetween but outside and home, race cuts race and frame cuts frame.In order to understand how such cuts are sexual cuts, we’ll need todeal with what marks and forms that place, a sensuality represented bytextured satin, the Dark Lady Day. The sonnet-as-frame and the mon-tagic sequencing of sonnets appear in conjunction with Shakespeare’senactment of a technicistic subjectivity. Here I would both extend andcontradict Joel Fineman’s Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye on the “new” subjec-tivity Shakespeare constructs in his sonnets: if Shakespeare instantiatesa new subjectivity, it is both the opening of a quintessentially technicis-tic poetical subjectivity and the beginning of the end of that subjectiv-ity, formed, allowed, and endowed by the double encounter (discoveryand expulsion, desire and revulsion) with the epideictic other.

Fineman argues that Shakespeare’s sonnets rewrite epideicticpoetry—a form whose name joins a root that means to show, bring tolight, reveal, point or point out to a preWx that signals both the sup-plemental and the self-reXexive thereby marking epideictic poetry asthat which is directed toward the description and exaltation of anotherwhile also containing surplus effects that are self-directed.36 Finemanbegins his reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets indirectly, by way of theopening sonnet from Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, in order to provide abackground against which we can see this Shakespearean rewriting andthe revelatory event at which it arrives.

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,

That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,

Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,

Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,

I sought Wt words to paint the blackest face of woe:

Studying inventions Wne, her wits to entertain,

Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would Xow

Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.

But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay;


Invention, Nature’s child, Xed step-dame Study’s blows,

And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.

Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,

Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite,

“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”

Fineman reads Sidney’s sonnet as a fairly straightforward mode of epi-deixis in spite of the struggle to praise that the poem represents: forwhen all is said and done, all the poet need do is look at the engravingor framing of the object of praise and desire on his heart and, in animaginary ecphrastic reversal, turn that picture into words. This impliesthe possibility of a direct correspondence between the visual and theverbal that empowers one simply to write what one sees; it also impliesthat one has easy access to a language that adequately represents whatone sees; indeed, it suggests that what one sees seems almost to gener-ate that language. What Sidney speaks of and prefaces is a kind of auto-matic writing, a revelatory writing, one in which “the dear she” whoboth prompts and receives the dual passion of vision and love is easilyand directly revealed, uncovered, disclosed; no impediment is admittedto the marriage of what is seen, loved, or esteemed and what is saidabout what is seen, loved, or esteemed. For Sidney the language of thesonnet is, in fact, a pure physical language and, to the extent that it isepideictic and thus reXects both the process of praise and the passionsthat allow it, a pure phenomenological language as well, one descriptiveof both the object and event of sight and desire.

What is new and both cool and scary about Shakespeare, accord-ing to Fineman, is precisely his admission of impediments to the mar-riage of the visual and the verbal. Shakespeare shows that the visualobject of praise cannot be praised directly since language and the visualare unheld by any absolute convergence. Immediately, however, there’sa deepening of this problematic because Shakespeare’s revelation regard-ing the impossibility of praise occurs in and as praise and because hisopposition of language and vision is always doubled by their relation tothe extent that the language that reveals its opposition to vision is also


about vision. This paradox is thematized, according to Fineman, by wayof the (dis)connection of the primary objects of praise in the sonnetsequence, the fair young man and the dark lady to whom the youngman’s revelatory truth and beauty is opposed—not because of any abso-lute verbal falsity and ugliness but because she is both true and false,both beautiful and ugly.37 What Fineman observes, in short, is “a poet-ics of a double tongue rather than a poetics of a uniWed and unifyingeye, a language of suspicious word rather than a language of true vision”that comes about as a function of “a genuinely new poetic subjectivitythat I call, using the themes of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the subject ofa ‘perjur’d eye.’”38 Fineman thereby provides a myth of origin for theanxious affect and effect of modern subjectivity through a differentialcalculation of the subject. What I’d like to move toward, however, isa representation of the incalculable that stems not from any judgmenton the etiolated verbal force of the subject but results, rather, from andin an improvisation through the interinanimation of singularity andsubjectivity that Fineman’s reading assumes and that the form and thecontent of the sonnets both afWrm and deny. Such a representationwould work in the interest of a new and complex understanding of thepresent and presence of the object.

The work of Stephen Booth, particularly his extended note on thegreatness of Shakespeare’s sonnets, is here both instructive and revela-tory.39 Booth clearly places himself in the position of the epideictic poetby supplementing his praise of the sonnets with a self-reXexive discourseon the praising of the sonnets. Not surprisingly, the gist of his argu-ment is that they’re so great because they exceed calculation, becausethey give us a visionary, revelatory experience that cannot be accountedfor when we break the poem down into component parts in order toattempt a calculation or a reaggregation—i.e., a reading—of it. Yes,Shakespeare’s poems show the impossibility of a truthful declaration—of a real poetic Wdelity—in the midst of a declaration of truth, and yes,they thus exhibit what appears as a strikingly divided subjectivity: thisis made evident to us as we break the poem down. Nevertheless, thetruth of the poem, its Wdelity to its object, is what is revealed to us in


our experience of the poem. There are, then, a couple of things goingon: we understand the poem and we do not understand the poem; weknow something in spite of the convoluted and contradictory evidencethat is the poem and, at the same time, we are required to try and Wgureout what that contradictory and convoluted evidence means and whatit means seems to be precisely the opposite of what it is that we know.

Shakespeare produces certain effects, then: a continual Wguringof the position of the reader and the dynamics of reading along with aforeclosure of the possibility of pure epideictic response that simulta-neously produces that response and reproduces the demand for thatresponse by demanding that we respond to him and allowing us to doso. He continually does that which upon closer analysis he proves hecannot do. And in so doing he forces us to accomplish the same feat.These sonnets are all intelligible to us in their general direction andthematics yet they become less intelligible the more we look at them,the more we know about them, the more we know. For the myriad ofeffects contained in a given sonnet, its multiple facets, when counted,added, collected in literary analysis, never add up to the sonnet itself.But the effect here is more than just the cliché of the whole as more thanthe sum of its parts. Here, rather, we have the following paradox: thatthe whole is undermined as an idea by the fact that it is not the sumof its parts and that in spite of this when we experience the sonnet weexperience it as (an icon of ) the whole. “Everything is in Shakespeare”40

is, for example, precisely that epideictic response that reproduces theShakespeare effect—the extension of that effect that I would here affect,implied by the corollary formulation “Shakespeare is improvisation,”would be: Shakespeare is ensemble, ensemble referring to the genera-tive—divided, dividing, and abundant—totality out of which and againstwhich (Shakespearean or post-Shakespearean) subjectivity appears.41

The haphazard conditions of their production and reproductionhelp to maintain the sonnets’ status as ideationally and bibliographicallyproblematic. I am thinking here of the publishing of what are generallyperceived as lexical or diacritical incorrectnesses that have had a mater-ial effect on the meaning that is produced in/from the work and, more


importantly, of the magniWcation of that effect by a sequential orderingof the sonnets that carries the illusion of a narrative but cannot betraced to the singularly ordering subjectivity of an author. This super-imposed narrative works in conjunction with the altogether untraditionalstructures of address around which the sonnets are built to maintainand disseminate the in/determinations of reading. We can then trace,for example, that “sub-sequence/plot” addressed to a male beloved inwhich sexual favor is sought for someone who both is and is necessarilyother than the male sonneteer and in which sexuality and procreativityas such are given as the (not necessarily linked) epideictic object; orwe can analyze the “sub-sequence/plot” that is addressed to a person ofthe “appropriate”—which is to say opposite—sex who is in every otherway unworthy precisely by exemplifying the paradoxically worthy andunworthy essence of woman and in which sexuality and procreativityare described in a “dark” imagery correspondent to a wholly criticalscrutiny of their necessary linkage. This second group of sonnets andthe protocols of reading they lay out are both addressed to the one whohas come to be called the dark lady; they are what I’m most interestedin here—partly because I think they allow for a return to the questionsof race and spirit in their own right and partly because, even if theydidn’t, Baraka has constructed from the echoed sound of Billie Holidaya bridge that spans the distance from the trace of Shakespeare’s sonnetsto the question of these questions. This implied return requires atten-tion to some minute deformations of the texts at hand—birth defectsin some cases, in others simply the effects of a new technology. Can Ikick it with a missing apostrophe or the typography of the “s” or theaccidental duplication of a pair of eyes? What happens in the transitionfrom the fair youth to the dark lady? What is the signiWcance of thetruncation of that transition, the absence of the couplet, the change inform from the celebration of the impossible procreation of the sonnetto the fear of a procreative blackness/beauty that has undermined allprevious standards? The undermining of standards is both an effect oflanguage and of Shakespeare’s intent in the sonnets—to explore theproblematics of the object of love and the frame of desire.


The falsity of painting—of the devotion of the eye and its engrav-ing on the heart—is a prominent motif that runs throughout the wholeof Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence but is reintroduced with redoubledintensity in the dark lady sonnets. There such falsity is ontologicallydetermined in the seen rather than phenomenologically determined inthe act, which is to say passion, of seeing. There is no slippage in theprocess of seeing/writing/engraving/framing or, rather, the slippageinherent there has not been contained, has wrested from beauty itsontological endowment, its name and local habitation. Painting now hasa double edge, at the level of the object as such as well as at the levelof the seeing/representation of the object. And whereas the possibilityof the truth in painting remained in spite of the displacements of rep-resentation, that truth seems more problematic when the object to berepresented is always already given as painted, its fairness either mereshow or absolute absence. This falsity or doubleness—a kind of strange,if not deadly, life or animation—that inheres in the object itself rendersthe procreativity the sonnets mark and represent problematic: they aregotten in the dark place of an illicit—and not “simply” impossible—verbal-visual concord, one that has its basis in a procreative structurethat is lustful and debilitating.

Sonnet 129 ends the transition in a sense: the effect of paintingbecomes “th’expense of spirit” wholly unmediated by that ethereal andtrue representation of the object of desire that the earlier sonnetsimpossibly attain.

Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action, and till action lust

Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,

Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait,

On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so,


Had, having, and in quest to have extreme

A bliss in proof, and proved a very woe,

Before, a joy proposed, behind a dream.

All this the world well knows, yet none knows well

To shun the heav’n that leads men to this hell.

Still, a narrative is discerned in this transition from an ethereal, ideal-ized, nongenerative, male, homoerotic, literary sexuality to a visceral,heteroerotic, and necessarily illegitimate procreativity that exists assuch only as a function of the racialization of sexual difference. Eitherway Sonnet 129 is an icon of the whole of the sonnets, one that con-tains allusions to the illusions of plot that take the form of a diagram-matically iconic, internal, temporal constituency that corresponds to asimilar effect produced by the unnatural or, more precisely, naturalizedsequencing of the sonnets.42 “Had, having, and in quest to have extreme,”perhaps the sonnet’s most analyzed line, is iconic of the sonnet’s iconic-ity. Thus numbers 1 through 126 could be read as those sonnets thatare in quest to have (the violent and unreasonable quest for the forma-tion of an interiority, a differential integrity, a singular subjectivity thatwould somehow emerge in an impossible homoerotic procreativity),and numbers 127 through 154 mark fulWlled desire with all the cus-tomarily feminized and racialized metaphorics of death and decay, fromwhence nothing comes except the impossible, tainted residue of art,while somewhere in a gap that fails to show itself, unless we take the“missing” Wnal couplet of number 126 to offer the impossible represen-tation of having, resides the action of which there is no view and whoseabsence produces the need for a retrospective illusion of “itself.”43 Son-net 129 would be, in a sense, the embodiment of the extreme experienceof the sonnets, the singular framing of their phenomenality, the clearestmoment of the Shakespearean difference in poetic subjectivity. Thatsonnet, that frame, would contain a picture of the arrested or eternallydeferred action of the sonnets and would thus also hold within it animage, if you will, of the arrested subjectivity that engenders that action.The doubleness inherent in the phrases’ arrested subjectivity or deferred


action is Wgured in the poem by “th’expense of spirit” and by theduality—the dark desirability or Monkish “ugly beauty”—upon whichor within whom that spirit is expended. Again, I’m interested in themodel of poetic subjectivity that the workings of this poem produce andexemplify and in the provenance of that model—the (hetero)sexualizedand racialized encounter with the object of praise, revulsion, desire andthe simultaneously enabling and debilitating waste of spirit.

a rush, onset; rapid action; the space or distance between two points;a natural or inherited disposition; a particular class of wine or the char-

acteristic Xavour supposedly due to the soil;a set of children or group of descendants; a generation; a tribe, nation or

people or groups thereof; a class—one of the great divisions of mankind; one ofthe sexes;

to cut, tear (with regard to weaving), channel, course, line: a row orseries;

a peculiar or characteristic style or manner [of writing]: liveliness,sprightliness, piquancy—“I think the epistles of Phalaris to have more Race,more spirit, more force of wit and genius . . .”44

NOTHING WAS more perfect than what she was. Nor more willing to fail.

(If we call failure something light can realize. Once you have seen it, or

felt whatever thing she conjured growing in your Xesh.)

At the point where what she did left singing, you were on your own.

At the point where what she was was in her voice, you listen and make

your own promises.

More than I have felt to say, she says always. More than she has

ever felt is what we mean by fantasy. Emotion, is wherever you are. She

stayed in the street.

The myth of the blues is dragged from people. Though some others

make categories no one understands. A man told me Billie Holiday wasn’t

singing the blues, and he knew. O.K., but what I ask myself is what had

she seen to shape her singing so? What, in her life, proposed such tragedy,

such Wnal hopeless agony? Or Xip the coin and she is singing, “Miss


Brown to You.” And none of you cats would dare cross her. One eye

closed, and her arms held in such balance, as if all women were so aloof.

Or could laugh so.

And even in the laughter, something other than brightness, com-

pleted the sound. A voice that grew from a singer’s instrument into a

woman’s. And from that (those last records critics say are weak) to a black

landscape of need, and perhaps, suffocated desire.

Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this lady.45

This piece by Baraka, entitled “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” is anelegy for one whose perfection was of the perfect, of its peculiar tem-porality, of the valorization durativity invites. Baraka’s Billie Holidayexceeds in the way that the perfect exceeds any idea of succession orcaesura, precisely in the willingness to move out, in voice, from anyprior restraint or rule, to expand the range of the instrument, to movethrough any shadow of a separation of the voice-as-instrument fromthe body.

Baraka’s sonnet would enact an epideixis of aurality, a move awayfrom the occularcentrism of the discourse of praise. We only see herobliquely, obliquely seeing, “one eye closed, and her arms held in suchbalance, as if all women were so aloof.” Nevertheless, a presence is felt,one that troubles the distinction between transmission and the sensa-tion transmitted, one that reopens the question of sound in writingand the question of fear. Fear because, as Baraka writes, “Sometimes youare afraid to listen to this lady.” Sometimes, the ghostly emanation ofher sound from his writing instantiates a shuddering affect, a fascina-tion or interruption that is frightening not only in the emotional effectit produces but also in the cognitive disjunction it opens, a disjunctionbetween the perfection of the Lady and the rupture of a dead, recordedvoice, between the insistence and the absence her sound marks. Some-times you are afraid to listen to the voice of the dead, to its palpable,material sound. Sometimes you are afraid to listen to the perfect failureof voice. That perfect failure is not just a function of the cessation—the “dying fall”—that the rhythmic manipulation of the durative voice


enacts; it is, too, the phantasm that the mechanical reproduction ofthe silenced voice emits, the artifact of the recording, the necessaryreduction of process to product, the containment and replication ofthe sense of excess. This is the paradoxical phenomenon that the musi-cal recording, the sonnet and montage demand that we address andimprovise.

“The Dark Lady of the Sonnets” (re)writes the music. It is morethan a recording in the way that recordings are; not merely an artifact,it transmits, through an improvisational writing, the music as a kind ofabstraction directed toward ensemble. “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets”is representation that moves in the absence of representation: not as anysimple valorization of process—though such happens in the words—andnot just in the ideology and metaphysics of spirit and nation (the expres-sive manifestation of the blackness Baraka loves, needs, and desires, theblackness whose overdetermined history of [negative] reference he bothextends and overturns). It is, rather, an improvisation through the oppo-sition of valorized process (coupled with the loss of sound, air, breath,or “th’expense of spirit”) and valorized product (as the artifactual, thepresence of the recorded and etiolated sound, another inadequate com-pensation like the orgiastic and orgasmic screaming associated with thedeadly concord of music and audience). It is an improvisation throughthe complex interrelations of shame, song, and prostitution and theirconnection to madness, intoxication, bewitchment, and infatuation: for-mulations past reason, of an apocalyptic tone, held within the expenseof a sigh or the frightening, arresting sound a horn or a voice makes inits extension, bound up in the metaphysical connection between jazz,death, race, and spirit.

Something problematic is at stake, though, in what above I calledBaraka’s “oblique” visual representation of Holiday, in the overdeter-mined visualization of woman as oblique, vague, malleable, interpretable,assignable in the process of more Wxed signiWcation. The vague partic-ularity of woman marks a mystery that signiWes origin, the unfathom-able site of an imaginary return—to the mother, to Africa—with whichBaraka’s writing in the 1960s was intimately concerned. Here elegy is


determined by the constitutive absence that surrounds it, namely race.What we have in Baraka’s text (in the apparent elision of the visual) isyet another “scopic hybridity” in which the music is reduced to some-thing gestured toward in an etymological reduction of “jazz” (one par-alleled by a similar reduction of spirit; a bridge connects “th’expense ofspirit” and the dissemination of jazz; that same bridge connects sexualand aesthetic procreativity: spirit, sperm, jism, jazz): the fundamentalelement of another illicit procreativity indexed to and determined byeither the literal or Wgural dissemination of a singular, originary, malesubstance. The sexualization of racial difference that is thereby enactedis a reversal of Shakespeare’s production of the dark lady of the sonnets;but that reversal is nothing more than a highly determined movementwithin the very structural economy that allows Shakespeare’s formula-tion in the Wrst place.

Nevertheless, a certain phenomenon remains: one parallel to theundifferentiated, nonsingular generativity Shakespeare’s sonnets exhibit,one that is perhaps best described precisely as the phenomenon of theremainder as such or, better yet, as the mark of the totality that “every-thing” (that which is in Shakespeare and Baraka and their “objects”) cannever capture. This phenomenon raises certain questions that troublethe distinctions between the object of sight and the event of seeing, theheard voice and the event of hearing. Here the question might bestbe formed thus: what is the relation between the determinate form ofthe blues (and the particular mode of subjectivity that form implies),the record (as the determined manifestation of a particular technicalapparatus) and improvisation? Perhaps it is this: that the recording is adetermination that is also an improvisation, one that extends, emanates,holds a trace that moves out of the tragedy the blues holds. Perhaps it isthis: that the dark lady improvises through the blues and all that itimplies from within its form and in the Wxity of the recording. Perhapsit is this: that the tragic-erotic end that the blues seems always to fore-shadow is supplemented not only by the transformative effect of impro-visation but the ghostly emanation of those last records, the sound thatextends beyond the end of which it tells. Perhaps it is this: that the sonic


image of a death foretold contains not only the trace of an early andgenerative beauty but the promise of a new beauty—song coming outof, song for . . .

The blues is what Lady sings and—in singing and in the excessof singing, by way of an improvisation through the overdeterminationof the recording and the determination of the blues as tragedy, in themore than illuminative, undertonal expense and expanse of her dark,fantastic laughter—exceeds. The record is the sonnet, (re)written inBaraka’s elegiac address to the one of desperate music. The sonnet is theanalog of the frame. Sonnet, record, and frame are their own improvisa-tions; this is to say that something held within these forms also exceedsthem, that there is a remainder that is not reducible to the technicalapparatus that produces them or the technicity that grounds them.That technicity resides in the idea of singularity through which sonnet,record, and frame are constituted and in their origin in a particular kindof technological apparatus, namely, the subjectivity structure to whichShakespeare is given and which Shakespeare writes and rewrites. Thatstructure’s essence is a technicity apparent in the oscillation betweensingularity and difference, singularity and totality. I do not think itwould be unfair to think of this principle, this novel subjectivity of thesequence or, deeper still, of the interval, as montagic. And, as Barakateaches us, “The question of montage is impossible without Eisenstein,whether they know it or not.”46 “[T]hey” refers, let’s say, to Shakespeareand Lady Day, both of whom were aware—always and everywhere intheir work—of the centrality of the question that Eisenstein (did “they”know him?) makes possible by questioning.

Eisenstein is essential here because of his theoretical exposition of ideasand practices already at work in the forms of things determined bytechnicistic, proto-mechanical origins. (These forms are no less tech-nical, for all their relative earliness, than those that determine much ofcontemporary aesthetic production—I’m thinking here of the sonnetsequence—and no less subversive of the technical in spite of their posi-tion within the age of mechanical reproduction—I’m thinking here of


Holiday’s recordings of her improvisations of the blues.) Most importantis his pursuit of a theory of montage as nonexclusive totality: thus hismovement from the polyphonic to the overtonal and all in the interest(according to Annette Michelson),47 of a whole art, a Gesamtkunstwerk,which would offer, represent, and enact what Trinh T. Minh-Ha calls“the multiple oneness of life.”48 That pursuit is restricted by singularity(the cognitive model or structure of subjectivity or principle of tech-nicity or technical apparatus that produces forms such as the sonnet, theblues, or the frame) in/and its dialectical relation to totality (the syn-thesis of process and artifact that occurs in and as montage), and by theinterval as the structure of that relation, the motive force and form ordynamism that infuses and animates “the ensemble of social relations.”Yet Eisenstein begins to put some pressure on that idea of singularityin a critique of the static frame: Michelson argues that in this theoriza-tion, in “The Filmic Fourth Dimension,”49 a radicalizing of montage isbrought into effect such that it enters its utmost possibility; but it doesso, I would argue, at precisely the moment of the foreclosure of thatpossibility. For montage comes into its own by way of the deconstruc-tion of the elemental status, which is to say staticity, of the frame. Sucha deconstruction cannot not include an improvisation through the ideaof the frame as pure singularity: this means not only a theorization ofmovement in/of the frame but an iconization that acts as an afWrmationagainst the very idea of the frame. When montage comes into its own, itcomes into the deconstruction of its singular element and that element’sintervalic relation to the set of which it is a member. What remains is atotality or ensemble that is structured neither by relation nor singular-ity but by the internal differentiation—the sexual cut—of singularityand the new relations, the everything, that differentiation allows.

Montage is the bridge that suspends or denies its transportive func-tion: it’s the internal suspension or translation of the syntagmic or, bet-ter yet, the phrasal supersession of the sentence. It enacts a disseminationof polyphony and pantonality within its heretofore univocal (time)line:the bridge collapses to an aporetic enduring, though, as I’ve said, thereis already present a movement through these in/determinations of


singularity. This dissemination of ensemble, this new animation of theobject, this animative improvisation of the old-new thing, is for thecinema to come: it is a pluri-dimensionality, heretofore repressed, ofthe instant, of the clearing, of the trace of Heideggerian Lichtüng orekstasis at work in Eisenstein’s formulations, in the context of an appealto affectivity or to the fact of the Wlm having to be felt. And all we’vebeen thinking of here is feeling—an ephemeral and paradoxical genera-tivity, an expressive procreativity improvising through opposition andrelation of cut and suture, the image and the sound of love. This is justto say that there is always something more than what is just to say, anabundance that accrues especially at moments such as these when thingssound “edgy, maybe garbled at points,” when “ears literally burn withwhat the words don’t manage to say.” This is to say + more that thelectural apparatus gives the word, in their inadequacy, something to say+ more to and for the cinematic apparatus, performative force deform-ing and reforming the categories of the audio-visual Weld. Lady writesthis knowledge onto Baraka’s heart and writing.

How long can he remember?

German Inversion

What’s gained by his dis(re)membering?Here’s the opening of Baraka’s essay “The Burton Greene Affair”:

THE QUALITY of Being is what soul is, or what a soul is. What is the

quality of your Being? Quality here meaning, what does it possess? What

a Being doesn’t possess, by default, also determines the quality of the

Being—what its soul actually is.

And let us think of soul, as anima: spirit (spiritus, breath) as that

which carries breath or the living wind. We are animate because we

breathe. And the spirit which breathes in us, which animates us, which

drives us, makes the paths by which we go along our way and is the Wnal

characterization of our lives. Essence/Spirit. The Wnal sum of what we

call Being, and the most elemental. There is no life without spirit.

the human Being cannot exist without a soul, unless the thing be from


evil-smelling freezing caves breathing high-valence poison gases now

internalized into the argon-blue eyes.

What your spirit is is what you are, what you breathe upon your

fellows. Your internal and elemental volition.

At the Jazz Art Music Society in Newark, one night, pianist Burton Greene

performed in a group made up of Marion Brown, alto saxophone and

Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone.50

“The Burton Greene Affair” is a recording of that ensemble. The musicthat was heard by Baraka that night in Newark resonates through hiswords even as it is denigrated, idealized, and distorted in the reading,hearing, and composing that forms the essay as name and description.Writing is marked by the possibility of variation; what you sing, read,improvise, moves you. Baraka’s writing is no exception. The question iswhether such movement must be a return. Baraka’s affair veers toward aprovisional return to the primordial and the question of its meaning.The aim of this return is twofold: being and blackness. Baraka talksabout being by way of the music and within what he comes to Wgureas an “other” tradition (one that values a certain understanding andembodiment of improvisation, one that respects and theorizes totalityin the work of art and in the artwork’s self-deconstructive relation to theeveryday). By the same token, the problem of blackness emerges onlyby way of an ontological questioning that might be the very essence ofthe tradition of the “same.” This conXict at the heart of Baraka’s textdemands precisely what it produces: deep sound. Such sound, in turn,requires the kind of listening that activates rather than fragments thewhole of the sensorium. One must, therefore, look at the music Barakamakes with his own vicious eye. Adrian Piper might understand this asa parable about the interplay of visual pathology and racist categoriza-tion, but she also knows how hard it is—within a certain continuum ofintensity, of aesthetic, political, even libidinal, saturation that black folkscall everyday life—to look at what seems only to emerge as the occlu-sion of blackness, the deferral and destruction of another ensemble. In


the face of such violent seizure, the temptation to return to an imaginedprimordiality is massive. We’ll have to see whether or not being andblackness are approachable by way of this originary, fragmentary drive.On the one hand, Baraka moves down the broken line of an appositionalchoreography, a (phono/video) graphic sidestep. On the other hand,Baraka translates the old-new thing’s improvisational theory of ensem-ble into an ontological language whose exclusionary totalizations wouldshut the gathering down. His translations cross over but only in thesense that would obtain if the design and engineering of the bridge weredone in some disruptively excessive hard way (as if the architect wereHardaway). This is the old-new language—tragic, hopeful, fallen—ofthe broken ensemble, the phenomenal object. Baraka discovers the im-provisational, ensemblic nature of the language of ontology in his useof it. He comes upon it by playing it. He invents it in a performancethat will not just represent. He improvises, thereby bringing to bear onontology the tradition of another inscription that renders “the tradi-tion” meaningless or too meaningful, that opens us continually to thevalue of improvisation even as that value is thought in the spirit of sys-tem, even as improvisation renders that spirit meaningless. His impro-visation is consumed by the very force upon which it would act. Thefantasy of return turns to cold oscillation. The only remaining questionconcerns what it was that the music that was played that night recorded.Perhaps what was recorded was this: the fantasy of what hadn’t hap-pened yet. The questions demand that we turn obliquely, up ahead, tothe recording, to what seems and doesn’t seem to be there, to what it is(to seem) to be. This is what it is to activate the foresight that is notprophecy but description. This is what it is to improvise.

“The Burton Greene Affair” is a network of desires, a constella-tion of nonconvergences, the erasure and re-enracure—repetition andvariation, passive and active forgetting—of some of modernity’s foun-dational Wgures (Wittgenstein, Holiday, Eisenstein, Du Bois, Heidegger,Derrida) and of what they resist and repress in the sensing of the tempo-ral and ontological, racial and sexual, other. This resistance and repres-sion is embodied and silently sounded in the music’s knowing echo of


shriek and prayer, its reproduction of the out thematics of the trans-ferential ensemble of a known, unknowable origin.

The ensemble of performance that is called “The Burton GreeneAffair” is neither the disappearance of the event nor the disappearanceof any possible product or trace (the record is neither deWnitive norunapparent) nor the dark consciousness—disappearing consciousness orconsciousness of the unapparent or invisible—of the ones who witnessthe event: it is, rather, that which disappears the conceptual apparatusesof identity and difference, singularity and totality. (The destruktion of )that conceptual apparatus is what “The Burton Greene Affair” is afterand is where “The Burton Greene Affair” is at: the turbulent conver-gence of a deconstruction of the machinery of exclusion and the emer-gence of a r/evolutionary shift away from that machinery and towarda radical materialization of spirit whose forces carry Baraka but neverallow in him a divestiture of the exclusionary thinking that he carries.That thinking is manifest precisely where Baraka establishes an ethosof violent differentiation by way of essentializing differences—betweeneast and west, spirit and body, elevation and descent, ecstacy and stasis—that replicates the (oscillational form of the) ethos and thinking hewould abdure. He does this even while his writing is driven by theshattering tremble of the improvising ensemble’s music. How do welinger in the ruptural, impossible junction of this reconstructive musicand the destruktive lens through which Baraka views it, a ruptural, un-bridgeable, asymptotic distance between sight and sound that textalways suspends.51 Not in the interest of an understanding or adequaterepresentation of the action whose performance would occur in thislingering, but in the interest of an enactive invocation, a materialprayer, the dissemination of the conditions of possibility of the actionBaraka’s text carries (on and over) by lingering, we need to think a littlebit about improvisation.

Such thinking is opened by an opening movement in Baraka’swork. He has moved on (from here, through that opening), but I wantto call into question the valorization of movement and process, to thinkthrough some of that valorization’s more problematic afWnities, to


demythologize the durative, to debunk a certain set of transformationalwishes, to separate the fact of transition from whatever supposed liber-atory signiWcance it is given, to trouble while also pointing out theEuro-philosophical (particularly Heideggerian) parallels to—if not ori-gins of—this valorization of process and to read what will emerge asthe valorization of process in the ode to spirit and the ongoing in theblowing of Sanders and Brown with which Baraka’s essay concludes.

The critique of the valorization of process is connected to an in-vestigation of the name and author; that critique demands, for instance,that when I refer to the moment and writing and writer of, say, Hei-degger’s texts, I speak of a particular Heidegger and not of Heidegger ingeneral. Similarly, I must be sure I know whom I mean, which one Imean, when I say, “Roi is dead.” I must provisionally honor the Barakanself-portraiture that asserts he was in that place at that time, that par-ticular now, though now he’s somewhere else, someplace better, moreadvanced. I must do so to show that the now and the fact that it isindexed to a particular product and a particular productive persona belieand undermine the valorization of ongoing process. But can we say anymore about these moments than we might have said about the trajectoryof the career from which they arise? Can I articulate anything aboutsome singular and atomic moment in the history of (what name wouldI use?) X any more clearly than I give the sense of an ongoing andunWnished project called (again, what name would I use?) X? One couldthink this all within the context of a certain Wittgensteinian splitbetween phenomenology and physics or an Aristotelian split betweenenergeia and ergon or a Barakan split between “Hunting” and “ThoseHeads on the Wall.”52 Finally the impossibility of accurately pinpoint-ing the name of the author and the moment of authorship rendersobsolete the temporal arrangements structured around the oppositionof the idea of process and the idea of a determinate moment of produc-tion in their relation to any possible discernment of the phenomena oftext and author, of the experience of transformation, of our access tothat experience or to the individual artifacts we might say are artiWciallythrown off in that process.


Note that even in invoking the speciWcs of the proper name asa way of marking the internal difference—and thereby undermining theauthority—of the author, and even in moving as gingerly as possiblethrough the epistemic Weld shaped by the punctuated temporalitywherein lie the events that correspond with speciWc names and authors,my work betrays its embeddedness in methods and discourses it wouldquestion. I have to hope it goes somewhere out from that question-ing’s outside. I must confront the strangeness or estrangement of know-ing that the project I’m after, which continually projects itself in everytemporal and historical direction (like the review or revisioning orenvisioned distortion and transformation and extension of an eventproblematically named “The Burton Greene Affair”), is the project ofEnlightenment, “the unWnished project of [a] modernity” taken out ormade vicious in the improvisation of ensemble.

“The Burton Greene Affair” bears a dialectical, dialectal stam-mer.53 It has a divided articulacy that recalibrates the rhythmic markingof racial difference. We’ll note how Baraka sees the ensemble in theinterplay of his own representation of Greene’s impeded search formateriality (given in the percussiveness of his playing) and Sanders’s andBrown’s Xowing extensions into and of spirit (given in the animation ofthe horn). The ensemble will have been given in the incompatibilitiesBaraka projects, in the cut between rhythms, between syntagmic orderand eventual break; ensemble will have been heard in the arrhythmiathat separates these rhythms. As such it is the entity whose apprehen-sion demands the improvisation through any prior notions of ontology,epistemology, and ethics. That apprehension requires an interest in thenature of improvisation’s time and the time of ensemble’s organization.These interests have in turn required an attempt to become more awareof the place of ensemble in this very writing, to sustain the desire thatyou anticipate, that you’ll have felt even now, to stop, to look up, tosing the inscription. Something in that desire feels like it might reachthe implicate order that holds fragments and ellipses and aphorismsas breaks in a background; that holds things that are neither local norcopresent together so that you don’t need to justify any attention—in


the name of justice and freedom—to the ensemble that appears as thejuxtaposition of traditions, idioms, authors, genres, grammars, sounds.Another kind of rigorous expression of something like feeling.

First Heidegger, then Baraka, then Heidegger again, 1966:

Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that every-

thing functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more

toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges

man and uproots him from the earth. I don’t know if you were shocked,

but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of

the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to

uproot us]—the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships

have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that

man lives today. . . . As far as my own orientation goes, in any case, I know

that, according to our human experience and history, everything essential

and of great magnitude has arisen only out of the fact that man had a

home and was rooted in a tradition.54

In order for the non-white world to assume control, it must transcend the

technology that has enslaved it. But the expressive and instinctive (nat-

ural) reXection that characterizes black art and culture, listen to these

players, transcends any emotional state (human realization) the white

man knows. I said elsewhere, “Feeling predicts intelligence.”55

Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by

thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a

god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the

absent god we are in a state of decline.56

By the time “The Burton Greene Affair” was written, also in 1966, thestructural possibilities of jazz improvisation had undergone a revolu-tion. In Free Jazz Ekkehard Jost writes,


a new type of group improvisation emerges in which melodic-motivic

evolution gives way to the molding of a total sound. For Ornette Coleman

the various parts have an intellectual inXuence on one another, resulting

in a collective conversation; for Cecil Taylor the collective is mainly led

by one player who acts in accordance with constructivist principles; for

the later Coltrane, particularly Ascension, the macro-structures of the total

sound are more important than the individual microparts.57

He adds that

in solos there is a gradual emancipation of timbre from pitch that leads

to a-melodic structures delineated by changes in color and register.

This kind of playing is more easily connected to a kind of expression of

emotionalism.58

Jost’s Wnal formulation returns, again and again, seemingly eternally, asa critical lens through which black art and thinking have been obscured.For now, it is important to argue again that what occurs in the NewBlack Music of the sixties—indeed what occurs throughout the shortand accelerated history of the music as the music’s historicity—is theemergence of an art and thinking in which emotion and structure,preparation and spontaneity, individuality and collectivity can no longerbe understood in opposition to one another. Rather the art itself resistsany interpretation in which these elements are opposed, resists any des-ignation, even those of the artists themselves, that depends upon suchoppositions. The primary problems here are that these oppositions canall be indexed to two others that move within a kind of mutual primor-diality—that between improvisational composition and that betweenblack and white. The question is whether the discourse that surroundsthe music gets to the liberatory space the music opens. These opposi-tions form the conceptual apparatus Baraka uses to represent the music,but there is something in Baraka’s language that remains unboundedby that representational-calculative thinking, something that places it


under an immanent critique. That something is improvisation itself. Itis, Wnally, precisely that motion that is free of the systematic oscillationthat begins and ends at the illusion of the originary, the primordial—the systematic oscillation that, therefore, never ends.

When Baraka split—from the Village, from the house, from inter-racial “romance” and (black) “bohemian” lifestyle, from other, formerselves (in)to other, new ones—he attempted (by way of a complex“return”) to move away from a particular structure of thought. He didso at a time when Third World national liberation was already beingengulfed in the emergent neocolonial formations of global capitalism;engulfed, then, in a certain economic world picture in which the dualmotion of fragmentation and homogenization, exclusionary differenti-ation and metaphysical sameness, are evident in the world and in theideology that informs Baraka’s text. Baraka’s particular form of national-ism emerges alongside a liberatory consciousness whose decline is alreadyencoded in the particulars of that emergence. Indeed, the nationalismBaraka embraces is, in some fundamental ways, a remnant or trace of the(philosophical) tradition he would abdure. Yet Baraka is not reducibleto nationalism and therefore his anachronism is double. He’s after andbefore nationalism as a nascent revolutionary ethics of response (ratherthan a politics or even a culturalism that bears political resistance onlyas a legitimizing trace), though this is what he would have the musicenact and signify. What Frantz Fanon theorizes in Black Skins, WhiteMasks as the encounter with the other as racially resistant fascinationis what Baraka hears and would amplify, transmit, or shape from “TheBurton Greene Affair.” He wants to transform the ensemble and itsperformance into an internally fragmented reenactment of an origi-nary and tragic encounter that would parallel the dramatic content ofrecordings that animate his trajectory throughout the early sixties asa set of transitions prefatory to an impossible return. Baraka’s black andHeideggerian nationalism comes as response to European technicity’sviolent forgetting of spirit and origin. The thing is that the music, whichwould manifest the interinanimation of race, spirit, origin, and free-dom along with the exemplary revolutionary ethics of the objectifying


encounter with otherness (which is supposed to reverse the direction ofWt both between lord and bondsman and within the im/possible con-sciousness of the bondsman alone), obliterates the ethical, ontological,and epistemological conceptual apparatuses upon which the manifes-tation of these complexes depends. As we’ll see, the music wouldn’t dowhat Baraka wanted it to do; nevertheless he’s carried along by it, per-haps in that self-same way that Greene is carried along by it, into awhole other thing, a whole other understanding of the cut between andwithin which freedom and identity might articulate one another, a cutshaped in the interminable constitution and reconstitution of a kind ofknowledge to which conventional philosophies of Enlightenment andopposition to Enlightenment have no access.

So what Baraka says about Burton Greene, that he is being drivenby forces that he neither understands nor assimilates, is also true of him-self. What occurs in “The Burton Greene Affair” occurs not only withbut through Baraka—the improvisational force of ensemble occursthrough him, in spite of him. More speciWcally, what occurs moves byway of some operations given at a speciWc moment in the developmentof Baraka’s ontology. All the collective and improvisational resources, allthe unresolvable contradictions, of modern European ontological lan-guage resonate—as the transmission of the sound of the ensemble—inBaraka’s philosophical voice, most clearly in the utterance (of “being”)that would name, describe, formalize, and therefore obfuscate the en-semble in the spirit of an other tradition, one that would read, reXect, andtranscend the interinanimation of being, language, race, and (the crisis ofEuropean) humanity. “The Burton Greene Affair” arrives at this momentin the world: when the restructuring of capitalism dislocates nation andorigin and when such dislocation is sped along by global and globalizingtechnicity that secures, Wnally, the literal formulation of a “world pic-ture” that constitutes the Wnal degradation of the illusory preWgurationsof Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. At this moment, in their appeals tonation and origin and in their relative inability to think an alternativeworld picture, Baraka and Heidegger sound alike even in the sharp dif-ferences of their circumstances, motivations, and utterances.


These utterances are sexual. With and against his invocations, the sex-ual cut still animates Amiri Baraka’s “The Burton Greene Affair.” Theessay is situated where eros meets ontology, and when Baraka’s text res-onates with what Derrida calls “the vibration of grammar in the voice,”we know that an old attraction to the interplay of division and collectionis at work as the animating force of a new symposium, an undergroundset and brokedown gathering, the ensemble of the black avant-gardedisrupted by the racial difference that shapes it.59 This vibration, animprovisational movement, resonance of the sound of (the) ensemble,is neither essentialized nor differentiated, determined neither by thevernacular nor its originary other nor the interminable and systematicopposition and oscillation between the two. Charting that grammarrequires more attention to the question of sex—where what appears asthe absence of the formulation of sex is thought as in relation to whatappears as the presence of the formulation of race—and to the particu-larities of Baraka’s comportment toward that question. Baraka’s com-portment in “The Burton Greene Affair” is Heideggerian. His refractedand repressed address of the question of sex repeats with differences themethod of Heidegger’s dismissal of that question.

In “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,”60 Der-rida notes the barely incomplete avoidance of sex in Heidegger’s ana-lytic, an avoidance unWnished by the presence of a moment in Being andTime61 when Heidegger argues that Dasein (the being to whom under-standings of being are given and who is not but nothing other than man)“is neither of the two sexes.”62 For Derrida, this is the formulation ofan “asexuality [that] is not the indifference of an empty nothing, thefeeble negativity of an indifferent ontic nothing. In its neutrality Daseinis not just anyone no matter who but the originary positivity and powerof essence.”63 This unsexed mode of being that Heidegger decrees isechoed and translated by the more complete silence of (the questionof ) sex in “The Burton Greene Affair.” For Baraka the mode of beingof blackness and its expression in the music is heard in the silence ofsex’s supposed absence. Of course an abundance of work across a widearray of discourses has shown that any absent or indifferent sexuality,


any mode of being that is before sexual difference, is, in fact, originarilyand rigorously sexed. In the cases of Baraka and Heidegger the openingof the question of being’s meaning, truth, essence, is sexed in a way towhich they are practically blind though they see quite clearly that open-ing’s racial, cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and aesthetic determinations.That opening is the location of a mode of being determined by (thethinking of ) Geschlecht (the locus of differences that is itself differenti-ated, the structure determined by what it occludes—by an absence, anunrepresentable silence, the unheard voice that utters and is uttered by[the question of ] sex).

One could say that sex is what lies secret and unheard in the workof Heidegger. In “The Burton Greene Affair” this unheard secret is athreat of difference at the heart of the music—which is to say the modeof being—of blackness. This threat to itself that black music carries isin Baraka’s phonography as well. It is, in fact, the very opening, the verycondition of possibility, of Baraka’s recording, invocation, and analysisof the ensemble. As ante-analytic resonance it resists the deathly frag-mentation of Baraka’s analysis even as it animates his nothing-other-than-analytic idiom. This opening of (the) ensemble, of that whichis neither represented nor unrepresentable but improvised in and asBaraka’s grammar and sound, is precisely what is unheard in the oppo-sitional structure of what is, for Heidegger, philosophical truth, aletheia,unconcealment. The music, the sexual cut, is what remains unheard byphilosophy—by the mode of attention allowed by the philosophical dis-tinctions between essence and contingency, individuality and collectiv-ity, particularity and universality—but the music is also precisely whatis heard and improvised in philosophy. It is that which avoids not sex butwhat Samuel Beckett calls “the spirit of system.”64 It is what Derridaattempts to isolate and describe as that which operates, but is uncon-tained, within a system of determination and indetermination:

What is involved in the phonographic act? Here’s an interpretation, one

among others. At each syllable, even at each silence, a decision is imposed:

it was not always deliberate, nor sometimes even the same from one


repetition to the other. And what it signs is neither the law nor the truth.

Other interpretations remain possible—and doubtless necessary. Thus

we analyze the resource this double text affords us today: on the one

hand, a graphic space opened to multiple readings, in the traditional and

protected form of the book—and it is not like a libretto, because each

time it gives a different reading, another gift, dealing out a new hand

all over again—but on the other hand, simultaneously, and also for the

Wrst time, we have the tape recording of a singular interpretation, made

one day, by so on and so forth, at a single stroke calculated and by

chance.65

What we have in “The Burton Greene Affair” is not a mechanicalrecording—nothing so seemingly determined and nothing in whichanother voice as singularity in and out of the constellation of Geschlechtshows up. In what appears as the absence of the recording—which is tosay in the Weld of its resistance—singularity is given over to a divisionand abundance whose distillate is the sound of the ensemble.

Meanwhile, in Cinders Derrida’s ensemble writes, which is to sayspeaks, of the impossible possibility of the mark’s copresence with theeffacement of the accent grave in the letter “a” as it is used in la, the“there.”66 This im/possibility is, Wnally, exactly what the improvisationof (the) ensemble gives us: not the Ellisonian oscillation between theestablishment and disestablishment of (the) identity (of the soloist)within a systematic tension between individual and group, individualand tradition; and not as an ensemble immediately foreclosed and frag-mented as it is submitted to exclusionary determinations of the social.This dual movement is what Derrida desires, though that desire isexceeded: the motion and structure of a truth whose revelation has atits heart an originary concealment, an originary betrayal; a momentwhere the voice of an absolute other is unheard so that the voices of theothers can be heard is not all that is given.

For this motion is always caught within a philosophical in/deter-mination—the voice of the other and the voices of the others are always,ultimately, only the possibilities of abstract singularities and particular-ities even when they are to provide a necessary antidote to the abstract


generalities of a given Enlightenment. The point, however, is to main-tain neither an abstract notion of universal humanity nor the abstractparticularity of a racial or gendered other—the point is to develop dis-cursive and practical organizational assaults on the concrete effects ofthese abstractions. What Baraka’s improvisation on the music offers,despite the determination of race and the indetermination of sex, isboth attempted closure and initializing embrace, and Baraka’s sound andgrammar, improvising through the attempt to decompose the ensemblethrough an interpretation of its anarchic time, is the resonance of aniconic totality to be heard only in the direction of a response to thequestion of sex. Sex, here, is not the mark of a particular exclusion con-ceived of as woman or the feminine. What is excluded, ultimately, isnot the mark of an abstract other but ensemble. What is opened hereis not the possibility of an other voice but the question of sex and thesexuality and generativity of philosophical questioning that inheres inthe exclusionary fragmentation of totality. And what is opened in thequestion of sex and interpretation is the possibility of a total, improvi-sational and anarchic voicing.

We’ll arrive at such voicing by way of an aspectual-ethical paradox:

And these moves, most times unconscious (until, maybe, I’d look over

something I’d just written and whistle, “Yow, yeh, I’m way over there,

huh?”), seem to me to have been always toward the thing I had coming

into the world, with no sweat: my blackness.

To get there, from anywhere, going wherever, always. By the time this

book appears, I will be even blacker.67

Arrival as end and process is articulated along with and through thedistinction between being and having, essence and quality. Baraka writeshimself as that which he already had, though what he already had isplaced on a differential scale as if he could become more of what healready is, as if that movement—totally determined—had no determi-nate end. In From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka, Theodore Hudson quotes


the lines above (from the introduction to Home, a collection of essaysthat chronicle Baraka’s non/return to “origins” in writing, throughwriting) but doesn’t dwell on the contradiction they embody. We oughtto linger in the cut between the “origin” and “end” that is signiWed bythe nominal poles of Hudson’s title; in, more precisely, the Germaninversion placed between LeRoi Jones and Amiri Baraka—“JohannesKoenig,” a pseudonym Baraka uses for some texts of his in The FloatingBear (a magazine he coedited for a time in the mid-1960s with Dianedi Prima) that has an important suggestiveness.68 For one could makean argument that this is the proper name of the author of “The BurtonGreene Affair”: the name of the imaginary native of an imaginaryreturn, the provisional name of the real native whose real return willhave always been deferred, the name that marks a highly localized habi-tation as the site of a transition to an unreachable home. Note thatthis structure of deferral is part of what is shown in “The Burton GreeneAffair,” though, again, it’s not reducible to this internal deconstruction.“Johannes Koenig” is, Wnally, a signpost that marks a certain position inthe history of Baraka’s understanding of identity—as well as a certainmoment in his own oscillation between identities. From that position,in that moment, Baraka enters and transforms a long, historical medi-tation on the music and its relation to artistic, emotional, and Wnallypolitical freedom. That’s why it’s important to have asked: what is themeaning and the implication of freedom in black music, what will havebeen the implications of the idea of freedom in the music for Jones/Koenig/Baraka as he changes, and what, Wnally, will freedom have hadto do with (black) identity?

There is ambivalence present in the title of The Autobiography ofLeRoi Jones by Amiri Baraka and, in a different way, in From LeRoi Jonesto Amiri Baraka. This ambivalence—rather this nonconvergence of des-ignation—of the name marks a valorization of process, transformation,and motion that signiWes much in the political and racial ontologiesI want to see ahead of or before; it raises a question—Who is theauthor of “The Burton Greene Affair”?—that must be placed alongsidethat which “The Burton Greene Affair” raises and that had been and


continues to be a primary guide: What is the agency that activates thetext called “The Burton Greene Affair” and that event/performance/ritual that we know only by the name “The Burton Green Affair”?So much of what the essay does is in the interest of denying authorityfor, in and/or over the event to the one known that night in Newark asBurton Greene, the one in whom authority is paradoxically vested bythe essay’s act of naming.

So the author of “The Burton Greene Affair” might very well be(named) Johannes Koenig, an identiWcation in between or off to the sideof LeRoi Jones and Amiri Baraka under which appears some dense andintense phenomenologico-lyric investigations into the nature of beingand its manifestation in poetic language. That name carries the trace ofthe German in the way that “The Burton Greene Affair” carries the traceof the particular Heideggerian brand of German philosophical nation-alism that animates Koenig’s brief texts. Perhaps then one could say thatJohannes Koenig is the name that marks a cut between names and is thestructure that would but doesn’t bridge the space between identities. Itis not a point of intersection or one-to-one transfer but a generativenonsuspension. It’s the mark of an improvisation shaped by the Weld ofnonconvergence that we might call the Amiri Baraka Ensemble, featur-ing LeRoi Jones. It’s the sound heard in the descent into that immea-surable and impossible distance between affairs. If Johannes Koenig werethe eponymous recording, echo, or backward sound of an otherwise un-available Burton Greene experience, then we could place him in anothertradition, of the self-analytic improvisation of philosophical national-ism, of a philosophical nationalist auto-critique or self-deconstructioninfused with the desire for another freedom. (This is the tradition—wherein certain animative shrieks and moans echo everywhere, in thesound of horns, just as masterful percussive beating marks Greene’stime; and Baraka, in a powerful tradition, cannot keep them distinct; thevibrating grammar in the voice is a sexual grammar, a sexual cut, a sexualdifferentiation of sexual, which is to say racial and national, difference—of the otherwise excluded racial/sexual other shattering the imago of anincomplete and static “universality” given as Universality.)


This is where these explanatory and exploratory identities keepmissing each other. But there is something in and where they miss eachother. Nevertheless, how do we account for the name change and thechange that change would signify? Is it objective or a projection of thesubjective experience of a reader (even Baraka as the most privilegedreader, the one who looks upon “his” own work retrospectively and withsurprise, with both attachment and detachment, always after the factof the work or the process that engenders or produces it)? Are LeRoiJones, Johannes Koenig, Amiri Baraka three separate entities or per-sonae or is there an essence or essential mode of being that exists asthe condition of possibility of these beings, that gives them to us andto each other? (Note that these are only three of the names by whichthis phenomenon—interaction of man and work or text—is called.)When I read Baraka, am I reading an aspect in a way that is similar toWittgenstein’s noticing an aspect? Is the logical structure of one name,in another Wittgensteinian phenomenon, identical to the others andto that to which they refer? Even if I say that the name of the authordoesn’t matter, that the author’s persona doesn’t matter, I still remainintensely and primarily interested in the agency that generates the text;and, of course, the name of the text itself refers to another questionablenaming or name. Why “The Burton Greene Affair”? The point is thatthe importance of the name persists and is unavoidable especially sinceI am, in the end, deeply concerned not only with the agency that gen-erates but with the author of “The Burton Greene Affair.” I’ve got toimprovise through all the names in the ensemble (this is part of thepreface, the cut between, the transition from LeRoi Jones to JohannesKoenig to Amiri Baraka and marks, would bridge, that cut; but just likethe way home seems to go through Germany, like the way back to theground of metaphysics is a middle passage, like the way back to Afro-spirit is through Geist and anima in spite of the invocations of the east,the way back to Euro-spirit is scored with the boom of an other rhythm).

Ensemble is and requires attunement not only to the name but to thephrase.69 The task of developing that attunement is given to us by “The


Burton Greene Affair”; by the illusion of singularity and the illusion ofits plurals’ intersections and divergences; by the myth of the crossroadsat which would be played the drama of the negative, of differentiationand relation, of an impulse to name and represent. That which would benamed—the sound of the structure and agency that is improvisation—is that which the crossroads only Wgures: the ensemble. Ensemble.

Such attunement requires concern with the uses of a few wordsand the structures and effects of a few practices in “The Burton GreeneAffair.” Such concern is shaped by the fact that in attempts to nameand describe reality through a particular naming and description of apart of reality, the structure of philosophical thinking intervenes andleads inevitably toward a conceptualization of the interplay of what isand what is not contained in the word “being.” To read “The BurtonGreene Affair” is to be struck by that intervention and its errancy:description and naming become something wholly other—an effectheightened by the concern with being that marks the work, a concernthat carries with it not only something of the history of such concernbut something also of the enduring inability to activate a forgetfulnessof being. Baraka’s language prompts that concern, a concern that is ofand for language, of and for the proper placement in sound and breathof fundamental questions.

“The Burton Greene Affair” strains toward what Wittgenstein calls“ostensive gestures.” Such gestures would perform a showing that—inthe very interstices of the verbal naming and description of (an) ensem-ble and its music—get at what is essential. But this performance gesturestoward a performance that its medium—language—cannot capture andtherefore improvisationally records. It thereby joins—which is not to saycompletes but is, rather, to say rupturally augments—this performanceof (the) ensemble that is (the) ensemble. This complex, compound per-formance is not simple though it is unanalyzable; Baraka’s corrosiveanalysis cannot perform the breakdown it intends. It only scars itsobject, thereby renewing the demand to think again about what kindof object (the) ensemble is. In the meantime, Baraka’s performance(phono)graphs what had seemed impossible to say: that the ostensive


gesture is not a simple pointing to what is simply present, that it impliesno simple relation between word and world. It is, rather, a resonance inlanguage of what is essential to its object. In such a gesture, through itsperformance, the name and the description disseminate what Barakasees and hears as the essence of the ensemble. The dissemination occursby way of open analytic failure (the breakdown of the breakdown) andby way of a kind of recapitulative improvisation (a lingering in theiconic break of this double breakdown). This resistance to analysis that iscarried out in and by the complexity of the object is everything. It occurs in thebreak, the sexual cut, between simple naming and complex description,both of which are rendered impossible by the object in its complex-ity. The distinction between the object that would be named and themusical—which is to say organized—compound no longer performs.This performatively induced nonperformance occurs within and as achain of differences and modalities—totalizing systems and exclusion-ary singularities—that are embedded in “The Burton Greene Affair” asboth name and description.70

In Philosophical Grammar, Wittgenstein makes the following for-mulation regarding ostensive gestures:

The correlation of an object and a name is generated by nothing but a

table, by ostensive gestures at the same time as the name is uttered, or by

something familiar.71

This formulation, given here in Merril B. and Jaakko Hintikka’s slightmodiWcation of Anthony Kenny’s translation, is quoted just after thefollowing passage in their Investigating Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein’s mysterious-sounding idea of showing has to be understood

in an almost literal sense. Since the simple objects of the Tractatus have to

be given to us for our language to make sense, we cannot say in language

that some particular simple object exists. Nor can its essence be expressed

in language, because that would enable us to get around the impossibility

of expressing its existence. For we could then say that it exists by saying


that these essential properties are in fact exempliWed. As Wittgenstein

puts it in Philosophical Remarks, IX, sec. 94:

There is a sense in which an object may not be described. That is,

the description may ascribe to it no property whose absence would

reduce the existence of the object to nothing, i.e. the description

may not express what would be essential to the existence of the

object.

How, then, can we introduce a simple object into our discourse?

Wittgenstein’s answer is: by showing it.72

In short, according to Wittgenstein, simple objects cannot be namedand described in language; they must be, by way of some extralinguis-tic gesture, shown. And yet this showing must not only be introducedinto discourse, but constitutes the very foundation of discourse. As theHintikkas put it, these objects “have to be given to us for our languageto make sense.”

What I’m after here is this: the linguistic problems that the simpleobjects of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus pose are not wholly unlike those thatare posed by complex objects such as Burton Greene, the ensemble thatbears his name, and the other members of that ensemble. It is alreadyunorthodox to speak of complex objects by way of Wittgenstein. Hislater work is, in part, an attempt to diagnose that mental state that seemsto be manifest as an engagement with the ontologically and temporallycomplex object in its impossibility. But I do so because Baraka is operatingwithin another political and philosophical tradition, one structured bythe exigencies of the complex object. Like the simple objects of Wittgen-stein’s philosophy, the complex objects of this other tradition resistnaming and description, but by way, naturally, of a more complex orien-tation. The task of “The Burton Greene Affair” is framed by and withinthis other tradition in its encounter with the tradition of the same, in itspropriation of the same’s tradition’s terms and conceptual apparatuses.That task—moving before the one who enacts it, as the trace of an


“ontological totality” in excess of this Xat description and of any properor improper name—is to show or record the ensemble by way of failureof language and to encrypt that failure in the text as (the representationof ) Greene’s failure. Encryption moves by way of a description that isnothing less than ascription. The ensemble, the complex object, bears aproperty—Burton Greene—whose absence would, rather than reducethe object to nothing, somehow bring the existence of the object fullyto itself in something that is not but nothing other than a kind of (racial,spiritual) simplicity. Ultimately, the difference between the impossibilityof bringing simple objects into discourse and the achievement of com-plex objects’ irruption into discourse is the difference between ostensionand improvisation. Ostension is an enactment on the other side of lin-guistic failure; improvisation is sounding in linguistic failure.

Meanwhile, Baraka’s description of the ensemble and its musicoscillates between the languages of the physical and the phenomenal,the punctual and the durative, count and mass; and he falls into thetraps of the systemic operations these distinctions delimit. He describeswithin physical language in order to phenomenalize, differentializes inorder to essentialize, systematically reducing the ensemble that it mightbe atomized. There is at the end of the essay the Wnal abstraction ofBurton Greene from the ensemble so that Sanders and Brown will havecontinued; their sound, become durative in the performance of black-ness, will have gone “on and on.” The trouble is that the removal (or,perhaps more precisely, the dematerialization) of the object—embodiedand enacted in the artifactual aesthetic manifest for Baraka in the play-ing of Greene—in the name of the phenomenal is part of a designationonly to be made in the language of the physical object, a language in-adequate to Baraka’s own construction of (black) “being’s” phenome-nality.73 Meanwhile, the ensemble—the complex phenomenal object—iswhat asserts itself at the moment when phenomenon and object eachappear in and as the eclipse of the other.

Heidegger’s determination of “being” comes within the thinking ofrace, nation, spirit, and tradition and in a language that is echoed with


difference throughout Baraka’s work of the 1960s. But Baraka’s work ismuch more than either a repetition or an overturning of Heidegger’s.Baraka moves along a more than philosophical trajectory “The BurtonGreene Affair” precisely because the sound of the ensemble is still to beheard, improvising through the motion of ontology, through the same ofHeidegger and the repetition and difference of Baraka. That I can callthe sound of the music a movement through ontological questioningbrings us to an other and overwhelming question: what is the nature ofontology, its structures and effects, in the black radical traditions Barakainhabits and extends? First, there is the largely unacknowledged factthat the traditions speak ontologically, that is to say, metaphysically.Heidegger’s words about what he calls “Occidental-European thought”might easily be applied to Baraka’s text and to all of the tradition(s) itvoices and pierces:

But if we recall once again the history of Occidental-European thought,

then we see that the question about Being, taken as a question about the

Being of the existent, is double in form. It asks on the one hand: What is

the existent, in general, as existent? Considerations within the province

of this question come, in the course of the history of philosophy, under

the heading of ontology. The question “What is the existent?” includes

also the question, “Which existent is the highest and how does it exist?”

The question is about the divine and God. The province of this question

is called theology. The duality of the question about the Being of the exis-

tent can be brought together in the title “onto-theo-logy.” The twofold

question, What is the existent? asks on the one hand, What is (in general)

the existent? The question asks on the other hand, What (which one) is

the (absolute) existent?74

Baraka’s dual question in “The Burton Greene Affair” is this: What isthe being of the music? What is the highest being of the music? Here weshift again, back to Heidegger, but with this dual realization: that ques-tion of black ontology can’t be asked as if it were located in the courseof a particular or “vernacular” separate from that of the “Occident”;


that the question of the nature of Occidental ontology cannot be askedas if that nature were located in a realm in which the sound of themusic—of Algeria, say, or Harlem or Tutwiler—is inaudible. Barakabegins by moving in the direction from being to (a mode of ) being.How does that move work, what does its motion signify? What is itsstatus with regard to what is seen as a difference in traditions? This is aproblematic described clearly by Edmund Husserl:

[The mathematical disciplines] are “deductive” sciences and that means

that in their scientiWcally theoretical mode of development mediate

deductive knowledge plays an incomparably greater part than the imme-

diate axiomatic knowledge upon which all the deductions are based. An

inWnitude of deductions rests on a very few axioms.

But in the transcendental sphere we have an inWnitude of knowl-

edge previous to all deduction, knowledge whose mediated connexions

(those of intentional implication) have nothing to do with deduction, and

Being entirely intuitive prove refractory to every methodically devised

scheme of constructive symbolism.75

What does Baraka have to do with these questions? “What is the qual-ity of your Being?” Baraka begins within a certain ontological commit-ment and within a certain ontological questioning. What is the status,within this commitment and questioning, of Burton Greene? Barakawould use “being” to name something that cannot be named. As Derridasays, “There is no unique word for being.”76 There is, rather, the com-plex origin of quantiWcation, differences, formalizations. Heidegger andBaraka, however, search for the unique word, the essence, the meaning,the essential quality of “being.” What lies between the desire for and theabsence of the unique word for being? Does the absence of the uniqueword for being mean that being is not? The space between the word andwhat that word would signify is the space of a deferral. In that deferral,Baraka reinfuses being with anima and spirit, thus reversing the dis-tinction between animalitas and Geist that Heidegger deploys. Can wealign anima, as differentiated from spirit, with improvisation without


that differentiation within the human of the human from the animal thatseems to inhabit Heidegger’s and Baraka’s particular understandings ofspirit? What, then, is the connection between animalitas and rhythm?Baraka improvises a holistic understanding of the nondifference ofhumanitas and animalitas, but follows, in a Heideggerian vein, with aninfusion of Geist into humanitas that banishes anima/litas and differen-tiates, all in the quest for being’s proper name. Baraka uses the discourseof animality to dehumanize Greene, a discourse marked by race andrhythm, though he criticizes that discourse as it applies to blacks in thevery same essay.

The performance, for Baraka, is therefore not simply (or even pri-marily) the existence of the sound, of what he hears as sound; it is ratherthe unmediated performance of essential blackness (and whiteness) thatis made apparent in the difference between sounds (here lies its “mean-ing” in the semiotic frame). That difference is spiritual, racial, tempo-ral: it is the different silence that occurs when one sound goes on andthe other does not go on. Foucault writes that “Mallarmé taught us thatthe word is the manifest non-existence of what it designates; we nowknow that the Being of language is the visible effacement of the onewho speaks.”77 Baraka would have the being—that is to say the highestbeing—of the music efface the player who, in his view, is the voice of anoutside, an other tradition. But his text does not do, his text does not be,the effacement of the sound of (any necessarily necessary member of )the ensemble. It would not designate in a way that effaces any aspect ofits materiality. What Baraka would do is turn the sound of music intomeaning and the sound of Burton Greene’s playing into absence.

Can Burton Greene—in the reconWgured space between being andbeings, Being and its word—be effaced without the effacement of theensemble in general? Can Burton Greene be abstracted from the music?Perhaps, Wnally, and to return to the beginning yet again, the answer tothese questions is to be found in the question of the name: “The BurtonGreene Affair.” In that name is the mark of the governance of the emptycenter, the thought of Baraka’s outside. These are questions of history—in the language (of ensemble) and in the music. These are questions of


tradition to be sounded and collected within the aurality of a radicalvision, as the improvisation of Enlightenment and through its other.

As trembling, hear the speed of Baraka’s narrative, the rhythm—barely regulated by the comma, the bar line, the pause—free most espe-cially at the moment of the most severe quantiWcation, atomizing, anddifferentialization of “being,” that which is done in the name of thephenomenon of “being.” What is the motion of our breathing throughthis passage? How are its rhythms determined and undetermined by themetaphysics of breath, of spirit—note that sound and content here arecombined and divergent, for the rhythm frees as the meaning restricts;the rhythm frees what the rhythm would contradict:

In the beautiful writhe of the black spirit-energy sound the whole

cellar was possessed and animated. Things Xew through the air.

Burton Greene, at one point, began to bang aimlessly at the key-

board. He was writhing, too, pushed by forces he could not use or prop-

erly assimilate. He kept running his Wngers compulsively through his hair.

Finally he stood above the piano . . . the music around him Xying . . .

and began to strike the piano strings with his Wngers and knock on the

wood of the instrument. He got a drumstick to make it louder. (Green’s

“style” is pointed, I would presume, in the direction of Cecil Taylor,

and I would also suppose, with Taylor the Euro-American Tudor-Cage,

Stockhausen-Wolf-Cowell-Feldman interpretations.)

But the sound he made would not do, was not where the other

sound was. He beat the piano, began to slam it open and shut slapping

the front and side and top of the box. The sound would not do, would not

be what the other sound was.

He sat again and doodled, he slumped his head. He ran his Wngers

desultorily across the keys. Pharoah and Marion still surged; they still

went on screaming us into spirit.

Burton Greene got up again. A sudden burst like at an offending

organism he struck out again at the piano. . . . he beat and slammed and

pummeled it. (The wood.) He hit it with his Wst.

Finally he sprawled on the Xoor, under the piano, shadow knocking


on the piano bottom, on his elbows he tapped, tapped furiously then sub-

sided to a soft Xap, bap bap then to silence, he slumped to quiet his head

under his arm and the shadow of the piano.

Pharoah and Marion were still blowing. The beautiful sound went

on and on.78

Here is the absolute reiWcation of the difference between breath andpulse, Wgured in the end of an affair whose beginning cannot be readbut through that end. Greene’s percussion signiWes the fall from spiritto time, from aspect to tense, from duration to punctuation, in “thedegradation of an original temporalization into a temporality that isseparated into different levels, inauthentic, improper.”79 That sound isoverwhelmed by the emergence and endurance of the primordial aspi-ration, “the beautiful sound.” Is this Heidegger or Baraka? Baraka,though the sound of “the east” is given its value within a Heideggerianappropriation of the idea of the primordial and within a Heidegger-likeintegration of aestheticism, nationalism, spirit, and primordiality thatreduces the phenomenon of being to a mode, a case, an object, a being.Sound, as the emanation of the highest form of being, is given its valuethrough the replication of Heidegger’s sense of being’s modalities, asense he sees as bound to the very essence of what it is to be European.So, for Heidegger, to be is to be, Wnally, and within the inevitable re-duction to a singularist, antiphenomenological mode, a thing, a deWnitething, a European thing, perhaps even, at the end of this declension,European Man. And, for Baraka, caught within the framing power ofHeideggerian language, a power that transcends the desire of and for theopposite, to be is (ultimately, and as Paolo Freire might say) to be like.Nevertheless, in Baraka and in Heidegger, there is a remainder, one tobe formalized through and beyond the optic of différance.

Here we come upon the crucial question concerning designationand representation of and in the music. It must be asked in view of theoverwhelming and radical present of the performance, its existencewithin a deictic mark that shapes its otherness in space and time withregard to critico-ontological reXection such that “the beautiful sound,”


the mark of black spirit and phenomenality, is ultimately reduced toEuropean antispirit and objecthood, by the fact that it has gone on andon. The music is in the past—as designation, representation, artwork,thing—though what it would designate and represent, for Baraka, isthe progressive acting and essencing of black art working and (black—which is to say true) “being.” Still there is that in the music that tran-scends the bounds of deixis and the ineluctably reductive systematicityof the opposition of phenomenon and object. It is that which gives thepresent of the music duration in Baraka’s work. These are questions oftime—in the language and in the music. These are questions of rhythmthat are to be heard and improvised in the percussive aspiration of thevery word “being” that animates the music of Baraka and Greene like aburied but radioactive and radiophonic chant.

Imagine that the buried, repressed cantor is Cecil Taylor, who will haveemerged as the central—if practically absent—presence of “The BurtonGreene Affair” and an indispensable Wgure in the massively erotic, re-en-gendered and re-en-gendering blackness of the 1960’s New Yorkavant-garde. His name brieXy appears in Baraka’s essay as that whichGreene either hopes to or actually does arrive at.80 Indeed, Baraka’sambivalence toward Taylor is much of what “The Burton GreeneAffair” is about and that ambivalence is not just about whether Taylor,and, for that matter, any European-inXuenced black artist like, say,Baraka is black enough, a black enough man, a manly enough black man.This is to say that this sexual, racial, national ambivalence is also a polit-ical ambivalence, one in which ensemble and its experience continuallyemerge, in which the sense of the whole comes out precisely in the rep-resentation and transmission of a certain transportation. That transpor-tation disrupts the exclusionary totalizations, the murders, that Baraka’spoetic intends. Carrying on, here, is bound up with being carried off,with being carried away by something fundamentally unassimilable.Baraka would represent this transport as a kind of failure. Elsewhere, forinstance in the Wgure of Lady Day, the willingness to fail was held byhim as an object of praise. Here, that willingness, in its very dismissal,


becomes the vehicle whose animative force allows a descent at once self-induced and involuntary. So that “The Burton Greene Affair”—which isto say both Baraka’s essay and the event from which that essay claimsits name—is an occasion for experimental, if not elemental, volition, forthe generative expression of the black outside in all of its dissonant andfantastical sight and sound.

’Round the Five Spot

The Xipside of fetishistic white hipsterism’s recourse to black authen-ticity is a white avant-gardism whose seriousness requires either anactive forgetting of black performances or a relegation of them to meresource material. So the hipsterism that Andrew Ross both critiquesand enacts, especially but not exclusively in “Hip, and the Long Frontof Color,” is best understood in its relation to a kind of vanguardistcounterpoint exempliWed by Sally Banes in her Greenwich Village, 1963:Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body.81 Interest in the his-tory and theory of the avant-garde in black performance demands thatone be more concerned with the b-side than the a-side of this now stan-dard recording. This is to say that I’m willing to deal with, to observe,and even to participate in a little hipsterism in the interest of a moreaccurate account.

This account will emerge not only out of experiences of blackperformances; but even if it did, it would be something way more thanan “earthy corrective” either of the idea of the avant-garde or of someconsumptive, bohemian rapture. The opposition between earthinessand rapture is authored by Ross. The ones who stand in for these qual-ities are Amiri Baraka and Frank O’Hara, respectively. Ross invokesBaraka, then LeRoi Jones, in the interest of correcting what he sees asthe anomalously clichéd descent into hipsterism that characterizesO’Hara’s most well-known poem “The Day Lady Died.”82 The “earthycorrective” to the clichéd fetishization of blackness is, necessarily, black.This is to say that Baraka’s black earthiness is invoked by Ross tocounter O’Hara’s necessarily inauthentic recourse to authenticity. Theauthentic recourse to authenticity, here, belongs to Ross. But I’m not


here to dismiss what seems to me nothing if not a “new” kind of criti-cal hipsterism. Rather, I’m willing to abide with such hipsterism in theinterest of what it affords beyond such regressiveness. However, I dowant to mark the distinction between O’Hara’s and Ross’s hipsterism inthe interest of invoking both as correctives of the rather less hip Banes,to whom we’ll return. This invocation must question the opposition ofearthiness and rapture. That opposition contains the traces of someothers: most obviously, black and white; authenticity and commodiW-cation is another, perhaps somewhat less obvious; the least obvious,though I guess it’s not all that hidden either, is straight and gay.

Earthiness is given, for Ross, in this line from Baraka’s poem“Jitterbugs”: “though yr mind is somewhere else, your ass ain’t.” Rossclaims that

Baraka is addressing himself more to the contradictions of ghetto life than

to those of the white bohemian in ritual thrall to the spectacle of jazz

performance, but his tone here might serve as an earthy corrective to the

rapt mood of O’Hara’s last stanza.83

So earthiness resides here in Baraka’s tone, though not exclusively so.Earthiness or some kind of authentic groundedness—a both literal andWgural soiledness—is aligned with “ghetto life” rather than a necessar-ily antighetto lunch hour happily spending a little money up and downSixth Avenue before being transported by a headline to some earliertransportation in or from a basement some blocks east, some monthsbefore, by Lady Day. Earthiness is what readers encounter in the voiceand tone of Baraka’s militant lyric subjectivity. By 1965, this militancyis more fully aligned with a heightened masculinity Baraka refers toas an “American Sexual Reference: Black Male.”84 It is opposed to anaestheticized Euro-cultural effeteness that is alienated, commodiWed,artifactualized, necessarily homosexual, and therefore fatally subject tothe dangers of the very ecstatic syncopation that Ross deploys Baraka tocorrect. Meanwhile, the white (gay, male aesthete’s) encounter with theWgure of the black that induces such enrapture, is, according to Ross,


given multiply in “The Day Lady Died”: Wrst, in O’Hara’s “meeting”with what Ross describes as “the probably black shoeshine boy, whomay be worried about how he is going to be fed in a way that is differ-ent from the poet’s anxiety about his unknown hosts in Easthampton”;85

second in the poet’s ecumenical consumption of “the poet’s in Ghana”;third, and most importantly, in the encounter with Billie Holiday thatpunctuates the poem and brings to an end the ambulatory poet’s fren-zied consumption of blackness, among other things. Note that such aes-theticism places blackness or black performance in an economy whereinecstasy is the end of a perverse, interracial consumption, wherein theheterosexual and the homosexual cut and augment one another. It is thejob of earthiness, on the other hand, in its authentically black authen-ticity, to correct such placement by deploying a purely and necessarilyheterosexual, socially realistic (if not naturalistic), lyric masculinity.

So I’m differentiating between two hipsterisms here. And if Icome out on the side of O’Hara’s it’s not because I want to dispensewith Ross’s. As I said, both lend themselves to another project of cor-rection in which I’m interested. Nevertheless, I want to linger withO’Hara precisely at a point where Ross withdraws, leaving behind onlythis trace in the form of a footnote: “That it is a Lady Day and not aCharlie Parker being commemorated in this way is, of course, O’Hara’sown personal touch. As a gay poet, and one of the most spontaneousof all camp writers, it is no surprise to Wnd that it is a woman singerwho shares the billing along with the goddesses of the screen which hecelebrates in other of his poems.”86 This trace demands a further inves-tigation of O’Hara’s rapture and its sexual content. And this requiresjust two more brief introductory formulations.

The Wrst is that it turns out that Baraka is a student of raptureas well. More speciWcally, he also investigates the very speciWc mode ofrapture that Holiday induces or produces in “The Dark Lady of theSonnets” and that essay’s prose moves, by way of the sonnet’s protocolsof caesura or seizure, along a path that is punctuated by that aestheticfascination whose intensity is all bound up with the fact that it is alsosexual. That Baraka and O’Hara were friends, that O’Hara records his


encounters with Baraka in his poetic recordings of his midday walk-abouts, that various lines of gossip and auto/biographical revelationsuggest the possibility of a sexual relationship between the two and/orthe possibility of Baraka’s sexual ambivalence only adds a little bit tothe mix.87 And if there is in Baraka’s approach to Holiday that whichRoss might call earthiness, it operates wholly within that mix, whollywithin the context of a lyrical analysis, at once formal as well as social,of the structures and effects—consumption and loss, eroticism andrapture, sight and sound, fascination and aversion, estrangement anddesire—of the event that we call Billie Holiday and of the relationbetween that event, blackness as black performance, and the idea andenactment of advance.

The second formulation concerns the excessively simple opposi-tion between Parker and Holiday that Ross invokes as if the alto hornemits only a heterosexual call, as if that sound is separable from the sameengendering force that produces Lady and that she reproduces in all ofits re-en-gendering power. The point, however, is that black perfor-mance, in improvising through the opposition of earthiness and rap-ture, immanence and transcendence, enacts a sexual differentiation—asexual cut in Mackey’s words, an invagination in Derrida’s—of sexualdifference. Indeed, one of the things that is most important and worthyof attention in the moment I’m trying to touch on here, the periodbetween 1955 and 1965 when the avant-garde in black performance(Wgured in and by the likes of Holiday, Baraka, Thelonius Monk, CecilTaylor, Audre Lorde, Archie Shepp, Adrian Piper, Adrienne Kennedy,Samuel R. Delany, and a host of others) irrupts into and restructuresthe downtown New York scene, is precisely this sexual differentiationof sexual difference that occurs at the convergence of fetishized, com-modiWed, racialized consumption and aesthetic rapture, that occurs asmilitant political and aesthetic objection. Whether in the virile homo-sexual friendship of the improvising ensemble (which could denote agroup of jazz musicians or a group of adolescent boys engaged in highforms of violent verbal/racial/sexual play—I’m thinking here of Baraka’splay The Toilet, to which I’ll return) or in the eroticized Weld of public


homosexual acts, downtown Manhattan was a fertile ground for thismovement. It is, Wnally, an arrhythmia that I’m describing, a highlylocalized movement of syncopation, a Village disruption of the space-time continuum whose internal sexual difference marks the assertion,rather than negation, of radical blackness on the one hand, and totalityon the other.

So the object is the trace or memory of a certain “libidinal satu-ration,” as Delany puts it, the erotic circuit that embeds aesthesis andconsumption in “the black radical tradition.” This is about that traceand its eclipse or burial, the surplus and excess, the simultaneously outand rooted sexuality, sentimentality, and spatial politics of the blackavant-garde. With fear and desire, Baraka ambivalently moves in suchsaturation. His recording of Lady’s performance is one graph of anensemble of events Baraka’s staging, participation, and observationhelped to determine that occurred between 1955 and 1965 in downtownManhattan, right around the corner of St. Mark’s Place and the Bowery.At that corner was located a club called the Five Spot. The music thatwas played there—most famously that played by Holiday, Monk, andTaylor—is structured by this temporal-affective disorder, displacement,and disjunction that I’ll attempt to isolate and transmit. This irregularbeat is like a general erotic economy that encompasses some live andmusical performances and their phonographic and literary reproduction.

I’m especially interested in thinking the syncope that this newmusic of black performances instantiates in relation to the arrestingvisions of proto-postmodernist performance in “a secret location on thelower east side” and public sex at the St. Mark’s Bathhouse that are bothrecorded by Samuel R. Delany in his memoir, The Motion of Light inWater. I also want to address the conXation of the sexually and aesthet-ically adventuresome that is contained in the dramatic rendering of aviolent public oscillation between approach, reproach, and reapproachof homosexuality in The Toilet, which premiered at the St. Mark’s Play-house (located about thirty yards down the street from the club and rightacross the street from the bathhouse) on 16 December 1964. Theseevents and their recordings circulate around the Five Spot, forming the


ongoing production of a performance that offers some clues concerningthe deconstruction and reconstruction of publicity and privacy, objec-tivity and subjectivity, liveness and reproduction. To be interested in thearresting effect or arrest of affect that the music produced and producesin the light of whatever recourse to authenticity, sentiment, or experi-ence such recordings enact or parody is to ask what happens when thecritical Wnger that points disapprovingly at an invocation of authentic-ity seems itself to devolve into an accusation of inauthenticity. Anotherway to put this would be: What will authenticity be after its rehabili-tation? What will blackness be when it enters and receives the radicalbiological indeterminism, the ineradicable historicality, the inveteratetransformationality that blackness as it is demands and makes possible?

Here, then, are some passages from Delany’s text that will provide someprotocols for reading ’round the Five Spot:

When walking somewhere along Eighth Street, on the side of an army-

green mail collection box I’d noticed a black-and-white mimeographed

poster, stuck up with masking tape, announcing: “Eighteen Happenings

in Six Parts, by Allan Kaprow.” . . .88

There was general silence, general attention: there was much concentra-

tion on what was occurring in our own sequestered “part”; and there was

much palpable and uneasy curiosity about what was happening in the other

spaces, walled off by translucent sheets with only a bit of sound, a bit of

light or shadow, coming through to speak of the work’s unseen totality.89

After a while, a leotarded young woman with a big smile came in and

said, “That’s it.” For a moment, we were unsure if that were part of the

work or the signal that it was over. But then Kaprow walked by the door

and said, “Okay, it’s over now.” . . .90

And of course, there still remained the question for me over the next few

days: how, in our heightened state of attention, could we distinguish what


a single happening was? What constituted the singularity that allowed

the eighteen to be enumerable?91

It was lit only in blue, the distant bulbs appearing to have red centers.

In the gym-sized room were sixteen rows of beds, four to a rank, or

sixty-four altogether, I couldn’t see any of the beds themselves, though,

because there were three times that many people (maybe a hundred

twenty-Wve) in the room. Perhaps a dozen of them were standing. The

rest were an undulating mass of naked, male bodies, spread wall to wall.

My Wrst response was a kind of heart-thudding astonishment, very

close to fear.

I have written of a space at certain libidinal saturation before. That

was not what frightened me. It was rather that the saturation was not only

kinesthetic but visible.92

Cecil Taylor and Amiri Baraka make music that looks and sounds likethat, and we need to think about what it is they have to learn and repressin order to do so. I mean that their music looks and sounds like both ofthese performances and both sets of theoretical formulations they implyregarding totality and singularity, visibility and invisibility, event andtrajectory, ungendering and re(en)gendering; and I mean to point outthat we already know this little area ’round the Five Spot to be the placewhere the impossible event of the Dark Lady, in blue audio-visuality,improvises through the distinction between rupture and rapture. In hername, Delany improvises through the gap between the unseen totalityof Kaprow’s fragmented, singularized, modularized performance andthe visible undulation of ungendered bodies re-cognized, by way of apreWgurative Spillers operation, enXeshed, en masse, the iconic dynamismof a seen totality. Number and mass—and the ontology, epistemology,and ethics they carry—are slain here; singularity and totality are bothimprovised, yet the arresting, fascinating, abjectively affective experi-ence of the sublime (that which is experienced as a kind of temporal dis-tancing and the out interinanimation of disconnection as it manifestsitself in the St. Mark’s bathhouse and in an apartment/performance


space on Second Avenue) marks the infusion of a deep sexual energy,brings the experience to a felt and theorized stop, or, more precisely,reveals the internal complication of seen and seeing aspects that is nevernot to be seen in its formal similarity with the musical ensemble. Cecil’smusic is an acting out disconnected neither from Kaprow’s performance(sharp and weird as in unexpected; way out, even, from the outside ofthe house, though still bound up within a certain set of inside exclu-sionary protocols that continue/d to animate the Euro-American avant-garde and mark its determinate relationship with that tradition fromwhich it would break) nor from the performance at St. Mark’s (an act-ing out as the performance of out—as openness and [homo]erotic pub-licity and the concomitant undermining of the complex that revolvesaround the juncture of perversion and solitude—though this perfor-mance of out is a proscribed revelation, an unconcealment with conceal-ment at its heart and as its frame, hidden and held, a publicity both realand virtual), though both remain, Wnally, inside, which is to say neverfully emergent in or as the public sphere that would reassert the com-mons of experience by enacting the out rationalization of a certain desirefor the experience of (an) ensemble. Nevertheless, these performancesand their transmission give us a clue that is both manifest (with all itscritical and sexual energy intact) as and a reWnement of Delany’s fram-ing of them. This is variation of not on, not but of, a theme and TheMusic is an improvisation of the clue. This is held as a possibility of theencounter, of descent and the ascension of dissent, of an action out fromthe outside of any earthy, bridgelike nostalgia, gratitude, and hope thatwon’t hear what some rapt, airy, dying fall—through the cut, castration,invagination—makes possible.

Delany understands the theoretical force such an experience ofperformance has in this way:

In the Wfties—and it was a Wfties model of homosexuality that controlled

all that was done, by both we ourselves and the law that persecuted

us—homosexuality was a solitary perversion. Before and above all, it iso-

lated you.93


But what this experience said was that there was a population—not

of individual homosexuals, some of whom now and then encountered, or

that those encounters could be human and fulWlling in their way—not

of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and

that history had actively and already created for us whole galleries of

institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex.

Institutions such as subway johns or the trucks, while they accom-

modated sex, cut it, visibly, up into tiny portions. It was like Eighteen

Happenings in Six Parts. No one ever got to see its whole. These institu-

tions cut it up and made it invisible—certainly much less visible to the

bourgeois world that claimed the phenomenon deviant and dangerous.

But, by the same token, they cut it up and thus made any apprehension of

its totality all but impossible to us who pursued it. And any suggestion

of that totality, even in such a form as Saturday night at the baths, was

frightening to those of us who’d had no suggestion of it before.94

See, it’s not the fact but the vision (and its attendant sound, its con-tent, that I want to bring out now) of male homoeroticism, of thehomoerotic body as totality or the totality of the sexual—the writhingmass that seems to operate beyond any notion of singularity—that isliberatory for Delany. And this is connected to a certain understandingof speculative Wction (the reWned, expanded denotation of scienceWction that Delany employs and deploys) as a mark of the totality ofthe discursive, the total range of the possible, the implicit decon-struction of any singularist and set-theoretic conceptions of the total: awider range of sentence and incident. The future metaphysics of theout, of the “to come,” of the speculative is, instead, what’s already givenin the descriptive and prescriptive totality present in Delany’s workas anarchic institution: the experience of critical enrapture marks thespace-time, the externalizing gap and caesura, of an old-new institution:(the jazz) ensemble.

Joan Scott argues against any simple experience of totality, anysimple visualization or perception, any unthought rendering of thereal or whole; but the moment of Delany’s afWrmation of totality is


also the moment of his critique of a no less problematic valorization ofmodularity, the imposed experience of fragmentation that he sees as aframework and opening of the postmodern.95 Delany experiences theorgy retrospectively in its oppositional relation to an earlier, no lessvisualized or experienced sexual tableau that is formally aligned withKaprow’s happening. His is not a simple critique of modularity, no sim-ple or naive desire for a hypersexual plenitude and openness—indeed,elsewhere in his work Delany engages modularity in an encounter gov-erned by something other than the spirit of an absolute, if impossible,negation. Delany attempts, instead, a double distinction between theimpossibility of a calculus of the world, the event, art, the happening,subjectivity, objectivity, and their reality and between experience andcalculation. This cut, which is the Weld within which the relationbetween one and many is improvised, is also the site, or can be the site,of a certain nonexclusionarity, if we let Taylor reemerge in his sub-mergence; it doesn’t take much to imagine that he might have been play-ing too that night, not far from Kaprow’s happening, somewhere ’roundthe Five Spot, his music the heretofore unheard and unheard of soundanimating even scenes in and for which it is absent. As we shall see, the(sound of the) said exists. As we shall hear, the seen remains. This isthe Cecil Taylor Unit.

Cecil Taylor is out in many respects. He is out of the outside/s thatthe music constitutes—of narrow and superWcial understandings of(the) tradition, of certain harmonic constraints, of certain assumptionsregarding tonality, of prior notions of totality and its relation or oppo-sition to singularity, of the solo and the dominant theorization of itsemergence from and disappearance within the group, of, therefore, atheorization of disappearance-in-performance that in some ways antic-ipates dominant contemporary understandings of performance. He is outof the outside/s only in the context of the group, or so it would appear,like that fold or invagination made visible by and in what Derrida calls“the law of genre,” the one that extends and deepens the totality itensures by way of violation, an extending and deepening violation that


is never an erasure or disappearance or is only a disappearance in thepartial way that erasure performs, a “foreshadowing description” ofthe outside that Set—the interinanimation of one and many that is ourfate, “this is not prophecy but [foreshadowing] description,” that divineEgyptian trace of Wxity to which Baraka sometimes negatively andwarily refers—takes in. He is out of the unit /s of performance, thesong form, the song and its collection, the tune and the normal lineupof tunes, the “standards” (of performance); out of the set, which is to saythe party, the jam, the get-together, the gathering, logos, outside of theimaginary disappearance of the logos in another kind of writing, anothercomposition, another movement through composition and its other,another improvisation of improvisation. But only questions follow here,ones that ought to make you go back and try to cut the sharpness of achain or run of assertions about the out of the music.

Like: (1) What is the Cecil Taylor Unit? First of all, The unit ispresent in Taylor’s “solo” performances as surely as he “leads” (struc-tures or feeds) the performance of the unit; the subject of ensembleis embodied in the piano, playing as Ellington played, orchestra heldin the instrument, instrument become orchestra, each extensions of asingle, divided, and abounding body-become-Xesh. So is it him alone, aset continually invaded or complicated, divided or abounded, by a dom-inant singularity around which it is structured and which is violent toor excessive of that structure? Is the unit that which erases singularityin the name of a unity in which the singular reappears undifferentiated?Does Taylor participate without belonging and is that participationencoded in the name “The Cecil Taylor Unit,” a unit of which Tayloris (not) a member, a unit dis/allowed by his non/membership? Is Taylorthe living principle of invagination or the improvisation of that prin-ciple, an anarchization of that principle that would place the wholewithin the Weld that emerges between deconstruction and reconstruc-tion? Embedded in these questions is the possibility of an invaginationof invagination, the sense of what is out from the outside, the outsidethat is never brought back in.

And: (2) What is it to be out in The Music? What is the sound of


this “out” and where is the sexuality of Taylor’s music-poetry-dance-performance? Wherein lies the cut that exists within and for a singlesex, a sex that is one or, at least, perhaps, the same? How’s that soundand how’s that sound performed or acted? How does out, the outness ofthe sexual cut within the same sex, sound? This is to ask: What’s it soundlike? But it is also to ask: How would it sound if it sounded? Does itsound? Is the out of The Music, The New Black Music, The NewThing, Taylor’s music, the music of the Cecil Taylor Unit, the out ofa sexuality that, while out, is not always as overtly referenced as theother elements of his identity or identities? What would an out per-formance—an acting out—be and what would the (homo)sexuality ofTaylor’s music, if there is a (homo)sexuality of this music, sound like?What would it look like?

And: (3) What is the relationship between the music of an out-side sexuality, a music in which that sexuality is out, overt, visible asidentity, and the music of blackness as another outside identity? Whatis the sound of a certain misogynistically and hyper-heterosexuallypoliticized black manhood and how is it related to, diluted, changed,silenced, disappeared by, Taylor’s sexuality? Here we can think Tayloras the site of an ambivalence regarding not only the complexities ofindividual sexuality or the sexuality or procreativity of an aesthetics,but regarding the question concerning the revolutionary potency orimpotency of a highly, if impossibly, gendered and heterosexualizedblack politics and the multiple status and conXicted terrain of the out-side as well.

For Baraka, back when people called him Roi, the music is the siteof this “American Sexual Reference: Black Male,” an out and visiblesexual mark, an out, black heterosexuality indexed immediately to shad-owed act, haunted and deferred action, motivated and concealed actingof a black revolutionary politics of which Taylor is outside because ofan outside sexuality and what Jones saw/heard/read as the pale cast ofa correspondent aesthetics sicklied over with a debilitating—which isto say alienating, feminizing, homosexualizing, whitening—bohemianintellectualism. That which is read as intelligence without feeling is


thought to dilute the native black/straight/male hue of resolution,subjecting the act to the displacements of nomination. But Taylor isa fundamental Wgure in and prophet of the black musical outside. Assuch he is the member who disrupts and allows the Black political unitand unity, displacing the “home” Jones would hear in The Music. Out-from-the-outside, Taylor is located at the center of Baraka’s ambiva-lence. It is apparent in his writing on Taylor, writing Wlled with so manyveiled and submerged distancings, critiques, outings. These writings arethe site of a dis/appearance or other appearance or complication ofappearance of the outside, an oscillation of im/purity tied to an equallyambivalent rejection of and immersion in the (myth of the) Europeanthat also, ironically, characterizes Taylor’s work, whose conceptualiza-tion is even today still bound to the notion of a critique of a Euro-aesthetic absence of emotion and the concomitant hegemony of aninauthentic intellectualism disconnected from its home or origin, whichis to say from the feeling that would predict—prophesy, determine,foreshadowingly describe—it.

Is jazz a kind of closet, a withdrawal of (homo)sexuality negativelyechoed in real and mythical carnal origins in explicit and illicit (hetero)-sexuality? But what of the inevitable, always already out and out fromthe outside, (primarily male homo)erotics of ensemble or of the femi-nized romanticism of a pianism of the body that is never not racialized,never not coded as the non-European, as the non-European withinthe European, even as it is coded as effeminate, overemotional, lustful,uncontrolled, animalistic or, at least, infused with too much anima, pos-sessed, transportive, out, ecstatic, gay? What about Taylor’s approach tothe piano, stabbing at sounds in the form of a seduction, the piano’sbody occupied from outside by way of incremental penetrations, ges-tures emitting light, light, sound in the course of out, out movements?What about the structures of a certain interplay, in the performance ofthe solo and in the “solo performance,” where ghosts or living spiritsreturn like Jimmy Lyons, saxophonist and longtime member—impro-viser in and out—of the unit, the love never not sexual that they out-wardly express and that is always put in (their) play and in their position


in the improvising ritual of the cut as if acting out in groups wereanother name for the unit, another name for (the) ensemble?

Is Taylor out? Is there something on the order of an afWrmationof his multiple identity (an out Blackness [or, negatively but more pre-cisely, an out non-Europeanness] or an out Queerness) or is there anacting out or performance of it that becomes a kind of disappearance, afree and out negation of identity—lingering emergences in and from theWssure between and outside as well as in groups: the unit, blacks, queers,or whatever other identities operative at this point, here, in the silenceof unmade declarations or of unasked questions? Would this redoubledor undoubled outness be the locus not of universals of performance butthe performative improvisation of universality and the space or sphere,never not public (for the space of performance, the site of the creationof new models of reality, the rearrangement of the relations and theparticularities of representation/resistance/identity is that proletarian,motley reconstitution of the public sphere, the site or precondition ofpolitics, of a politics that improvises resistance) where performance orimprovisation or (the) ensemble, the Cecil Taylor Unit, occur as oneanother’s other selves?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes that

we must connect with the subaltern presupposition where heterosexual

reproduction is a moment in the general normativity of a homosexuality

for which the sexual encounter itself is a case of the caress. And this dif-

ference between homo- and heterosexuality is as unrecognized as it is

underived in that theatre.96

This is to say that that difference is in that it is performed, disappeared,or not apparent given the understanding of performance within whichor without which we’ve been operating. Taylor is out in his performanceto the extent that he enacts the disappearance of any differentiated iden-tity in the reenactment of the caress, the dis/appearance of the sexualencounter that the musical performance always is. And that encoun-ter is never not fecund, always produces or is generative, is generative


through and in spite of and in the disappearance of whatever commod-ity might have been produced in or by its enactment such that the recordis undone in a certain way by the precise difference, apparent and dis-appeared, between itself and the performance that it records, even ifthat recording is marked “live!” thereby signifying the erstwhile captureof a genuine and actual publicity, the transformative, dis/appearing,dis/apparent effects of audition.

The “mechanical reproduction of performance” can also be arationalization (precisely of the social). And what might be thrown outfrom this out is not the general normativity of homosexuality but avariation of that theme. The encounter reproduces but its generativityor fecundity, the sexuality and procreativity of the music, the genera-tivity of variation or improvisation, is not a function of difference butof its performance, which is to say its dis/appearance. The outness ofblackness is similarly performed and dis/appeared, taken way outside,like the marks and logics of the old-new world order, critiqued in theirdis/appearance and resisted in their re-citation, in re-citations thatprovide for us a transcendental clue about the direction of our own en-counters and organizations. This is that out performance of the outnessof subalternity, improvising blackness and its others, capitalism and itsother, homosexuality and its others, in a subalternity without originand possible everywhere, a subalternity of universality, a subalternity ofensemble.

Taylor at the Five Spot and the ritual (symposium, gathering, set)Delany records at the St. Mark’s Bathhouse are each conditions of theother’s possibility. This is the fantasy Baraka engages and cannot abide,distorts and records in The Toilet, letting us know, in spite of himself,that the space of the black avant-garde is a sexual underground. Thereinhe attempts to redraw the distinctions between eros and the sexual act,homosociality and homosexuality. The homoerotic and its radicalness,its performance in the music, are located in these interstices whereinthe primary activity is to catch one’s breath, to have one’s breath caught,to think the syncope in its audiovisual origins also as an effect of


performance, to think the performer catching her breath, Lady or Cecilpausing, pausing in performance and at the sight of what? Now we haveto think the pauses of Delany and of O’Hara ’round the Five Spot andthe sexual and aesthetic logic of interruption.

Suddenly, time falters.

First, the head spins, overcome with a slight vertigo. It is nothing;

but then the spinning goes wild, the ears start to ring, the earth gives way

and disappears, one sinks back, goes away. . . . Where does one go?

The subject, says the doctor, is inert, pale, without consciousness.

Sensitivity is obliterated. There is no respiration, no pulse can be felt. . . .

after a necessarily short time, the pulse reappears, so does the respiration;

the skin regains color; the sick person regains consciousness. Otherwise,

the ending is fatal; syncope leads to death.

Syncope: an absence of the self. A “cerebral eclipse,” so similar to

death that it is also called “apparent death”; it resembles its model so

closely that there is a risk of never recovering from it. The romantic and

clinical scenario has usually, in our society, been allotted to woman: it is

she who sinks down, dress spreading out like a Xower, fainting, before a

public that hurries forward; arms reach out, carry the unresisting body. . . .

People slap her, make her sniff salts. When she comes to, her Wrst words

will be, “Where am I?” And because she has come to, “come back,” no

one thinks to ask where she has been The real question would be, rather,

“Where was I?” But no, when one returns from syncope it is the real

world that suddenly looks strange.97

“Syncope” is a strange word. It pivots from the clinic to the art of

dance, tilts toward poetry, Wnally ends up in music. In each of these Welds,

syncope takes on a deWnition. At Wrst there is a shock, a suppression:

something gets lost, but no one says what is won.

Suddenly, time falters.

The couple seems to walk rather than dance, briskly, entwined.

Who could separate them? But the man takes the woman’s waist, and—

so quickly that the movement can hardly be seen—bends her at midbody


to touch the Xoor, and there they are, the two of them, overturned, sus-

pended, as if he had stabbed her, maybe, or kissed her. They stop there,

as if frozen for an instant. . . . He raises her, whirls, starts again. Tango.

She is called his partner, his “rider” (cavalière); in its day the Church pro-

hibited the tango as indecent. Syncope—here syncopation—is evident

in the backward dip, inherent in the step itself: three steady steps, at a

trot, then nothing. Suspense. It is in the missing beat that one can falter.

Obscenity.98

This is the anaesthetic of the syncope that Catherine Clément offers. Itis anaesthetic by way of synaesthesia, the senses, now theoreticians intheir practice, fully emergent in and as their communism. Meanwhile,O’Hara’s been shopping; meanwhile, Baraka’s hanging with O’Hara, arecurrent character in the consumptive, licentious, lunchtime bohemi-anism he now disavows. Lady makes people stop breathing at the FiveSpot—by her sound and, as Taylor writes, by way of the visible: “Asgesture jazz became: Billie’s right arm bent at breast moving as lighttouch.” The remembrance of her syncoptic power produces fear, termi-nates lines. Everybody stopped breathing. One emerges from the syn-cope with a memory, as if one had been on a trip. One comes back fromsomewhere and it seems to rupture or arrest all previous itineraries.

And there is a racialization as well as a sexualization of syncope.The syncope has an effect of further whitening the white, a loss of colorsignifying the always already given whiteness of the woman who falters.And it is the woman who falters rather than produces in others thesyncope. But we know, between Frederick Douglass and Frank O’Hara,that the syncope is produced by black women, the extremest possibilityof their impossibility, a trace effect of scream and whisper, “snikker andwhine.” Here a certain relation between syncope and orgasm, the littledeath that is marked for us already in the gesture and dance of shopping,syncope, and jazz. And there the syncope is a homosexual affair. But thedark lady of the sonnets is a writing of and out of syncope and its earth-iness is, in this respect, the airy, disconnected earthiness of consump-tion, of that which Ross would invoke Baraka’s earthiness to correct.


And when one thinks of the orgasm (by way of Baldwin at the end ofJust above My Head, then Kristeva at the opening of Powers of Horror) asan impossible ingestion, one can think the relation between syncope andabjection as well, its effects and direction, who produces it, its relationto fascination, its aurality or vocality, the response to its call. All this isindispensable and it is indispensable, Wnally, to any possible understand-ing, say, of Douglass’s Aunt Hester, or Bessie Smith, or Lady, producersor enactors of syncope, syncopation, sexual cuts, jazz, a certain blackavant-guardedness.

This is, for instance, Monk’s gestures and the sounds they produce,his movements circling away from and back to the piano in the ecstaticpause of somebody else’s solo. Meanwhile, much of what is called post-modern dance, much of what is valorized as the essence of the iconoclas-tic downtown avant-garde by Banes, will have become the choreographyof mass conformity, the Cold War’s absence of affect, the postural artic-ulation of the authoritarian personality, its outward forms and innerdesolation. Paul Taylor in the gray Xannel suit. Perhaps they would cri-tique or break away from mass conformity by way of the movementsand gestures of mass conformity. But you could have found some newmovements at the Five Spot, where Monk, way beyond simply achiev-ing, reorganizes and reaestheticizes the natural. Where maladjustmentconverges with the unassimilable, where communism converges withsexual nonconformity, where outward presence—as visual-gestural-aural-locomotive pathology—is given as the extension of just that kind ofcriminal insanity we call the ongoing resistance to slavery: that’s what’sat work at the Five Spot. ’Round the Five Spot lies the out internal dif-ferentiation of the metropole, an internal imperial maladjustment if notdecay, the germ or trace, yet to be more fully disseminated—always indanger of appropriation or commodiWcation since what we’re talkinghere is the ongoing intervention of the commodity, the object—thoughhere we’re waiting for it to come around again. It comes around againas memory, memoir, recording. The ongoing refusal of adjustment orassimilation at the same time as a movement emerges, one that seemsas if it’s all about the desire to adjust and assimilate, the paradoxical


inexorableness of what we now know to have been an impossible inclu-sion. The avant-garde is always subject to inclusion’s injunction to pass.This is what Paul Taylor, businessman, teaches us. (This is a lesson alsotaught and retaught at various drag balls, as if in contrast to such ascene’s other interventions, as if to signify Harlem’s ongoing preWgura-tive recapitulation of the whole downtown scene.) This is the politicallimit of realness. Yet the movement was not given in the desire for real-ness but in the desire for the outside, always driven by a happy inabilityto include it. The critique of inclusion was ongoing ’round the Five Spot:the radical outness of certain movements through subjectivity by objects,by the objections of the ones who have been objects, is what responds tothe impossibility of inclusion as desire or philosophy as a function oflaw or custom but also as the function of a quite particular refusal toadjust. The out gestures of this refusal or objection remain before what-ever origin we imagine, passing through each and animating them all.It animates the inclusionary movement and makes it impossible.

The main character in The Toilet is named Ray but called Foots. It’s notimpossible to imagine that this has to do with a certain facility in run-ning, running at the mouth as well as by the foots, the combination ofwhich is the condition of possibility of a leadership that is always poten-tially undermined by the leader’s unwillingness to Wght. Foots is alwaysmoving in and with and as the shadow of a manhood problem; and thething about Foots is a recurrent refusal that takes place at the entranceinto the scene, a refusal to descend, or maybe ascend, into the ecstasyor rapture of his own initial emotional response. (This is a manhoodproblem too.) The play is, therefore, replete with a series of highlycontrolled syncopations that experimentally structure, destructure, andrestructure Foots and, in so doing, mark a revealing, if unrevealed, lackof control. Foots exists most fully as this problematic combination of(narrated) gesture and movement. He’s a main character given to usprimarily in the words, gestures, and movements of others or by way ofthe stage directions that narrate his gestures and movements. The stagedirections time and again show him suspending the suspension that


emotion demands of him within the context of a play whose main action(Foots’s Wghting the boy, Karolis, who has sent him a letter “telling himhe thought he was ‘beautiful . . . and that he wanted to blow him’”) willnever really happen:

FOOTS: Yeh, somebody told him Knowles said he was gonna kick Karolis’

ass. [Seeing KAROLIS [who has already been beaten by Foots’s boys] in the corner

for the Wrst time. His Wrst reaction is horror and disgust . . . but he keeps it

controlled as is his style, and merely half-whistles.] Goddamn! What the fuck

happened to him? [He goes over to KAROLIS and kneels near him, threatening

to stay too long. He controls the impulse and gets up and walks back to where

he was. He is talking throughout his action.] Damn! What’s you guys do, kill

the cat?99

KAROLIS: [has brought his head up during the preceeding scufXe, and has been

staring at FOOTS. As FOOTS and the others look over toward him, he speaks very

softly, but Wrmly] No. Nobody has to leave. I’ll Wght you, Ray. [He begins to

pull himself up. He is unsteady on his feet, but determined to get up . . . and to

Wght.] I want to Wght you.

FOOTS is startled and his eyes widen momentarily, but he suppresses it.100

KAROLIS: Yes, Ray, I want to Wght you, now. I want to kill you.

His voice is soft and terrible. The word “kill” is almost spit out. FOOTS does not

move. He turns his head slightly to look KAROLIS in the eye, but he is motionless

otherwise.101

But to say that the play’s main action never really happens is impre-cise. The Wght does occur, it’s just that it’s most fully itself as dance, asembrace, as a movement of and in rapture that corresponds to nothingso much as what Du Bois terms frenzy, nothing so much as the intenseerotics—sometimes hushed, sometimes violent—that prefaces and is theentrance into another scene. The combination of refusal and resolve thatmarks Foots’s Wght-as-Xight is the aggregate of these halting entrancesinto the homosexual, interracial seizure Lady Day induces. Baraka’s work,


over the course of the early 1960s is, in large part, the struggle to em-brace such seizure, to think and renew its political content and force.That embrace is literally and doubly enacted at the end of The Toiletwhen Ray, defeated, as it were, by Karolis’s murderous hug, crawls aloneback into the scene to cradle the boy’s battered head in his arms.Baraka’s work is also, at the same time, a massive disavowal of any suchembrace, a disavowal continually given in his desire for a puriWed racialand sexual self-referentiality. This is to say that the condition of possi-bility of such embrace will become an ever more violent puriWcation offrenzy or rapture, one that always threatens to erase what it is thatmakes rapture possible in the Wrst place. The imaginary return to anoriginarily earthy blackness or black heterosexual maleness is the paththat Baraka must always take toward this puriWcation and so one mustalways beware any such invocations of the soil. Nevertheless, by way ofa certain illegitimate return of Barakan earthiness, one is given accessto that dialectical relation to those complexities of rapture that are, infact, always the invaginating, propelling force of blackness, which is tosay, of black avant-garde.102

In the meantime, Banes says that “there were no black under-ground Wlmmakers . . . there were no downtown black dancers . . . therewere no black Happenings-makers; no black pop-artists. . . . That is,many black artists may not have had a taste for the kind of iconoclasticactivity—the product of some measure of educational privilege—inwhich the white artists reveled.”103 I guess, in the end, it’s not eventhat crucial to open an argument against her position by saying thatshe must not have been looking ’round the Five Spot. The downtownscene would have never come together as simply as she seems to imag-ine, and if it ever did there will have been no place for anyone to enterit. Instead, we can draw a broken circle ’round the Five Spot in the waythat Mingus plays a broken circle ’round the Music’s rhythmic center.This matrical, pulsive stoptime, this ruptural and enraptured disclosureof the commons, is the black avant-garde, where blackness is given asblack performance in that improvisation of authenticity and totalitythat is the sexual cut of sexual difference.


Baldwin’s Baraka, His Mirror Stage, the Sound of His Gaze

“Look,” he said. Jimmy’s eyes had already followed Beauford [Delaney]’s

anyway, but he just saw water. “Look again,” Beauford said. Then he

noticed the oil on the surface of the water and the way it transformed

the buildings it reXected. . . . it had to do with the fact that what one can

and cannot see “says something about you.”1

Look.The Wrst take like a start before the just rhythm; the second and

the oil on water is music. The Xorescent music of St. Mark’s Place, themusic ’round the Five Spot, is a lover’s complaint. Move in some moresecond looks.

Here’s a passage from Lee Edelman’s essay “The Part for the (W)hole”:

Yet as black men already burdened by the “double-consciousness” that

reXects their historical determination by the demand be the part, the

“tool,” that white men alone can have, Arthur and Crunch [characters

in James Baldwin’s Just above My Head], at the moment of their erotic

and emotional involvement with one another, risk psychic annihilation

through the double dismemberment of synecdochic logic; violently

C H A P T E R 3

Visible Music

171

reduced by the racist synecdoche that takes genital part for the whole,

they are subject as well to the distinctively homophobic rewriting of

synecdoche that polices “masculinity” by decreeing that the (male) “part”

can only properly “stand” for the (female) “hole.” Given its ominous

doubling of the “double-consciousness” that splits black identity, it is

appropriate that this moment of sexual discovery—mixing as it does

both terror and liberation—should take place while Arthur and Crunch

are performing in a gospel quartet on a tour of the South. This juxtapo-

sition of a repressive political geography against “the vast and unmapped

geography of himself” that Arthur Wrst dares to negotiate in his sexual

relation with Crunch reinforces the novel’s analysis of racism as congru-

ent with homophobia rather than homosexuality, and it links the “racial”

paranoia instilled in the gospel quartet by their consciousness in the

South of “the eyes which endlessly watch them” with the homographic

anxiety that Arthur will feel when, after his intimacy with Crunch, he

starts to wonder “if his change was visible.” Crunch will go mad and

Arthur die young as a consequence of internalizing the abjectifying

judgments, both racist and homophobic, of the culture around them:

internalized judgments that condemned them for engaging in other acts

of “internalization”—acts in which their bodies open up to take in the

phallic signiWer to which they will thereby be viewed as having ceded any

legitimate claim.2

Edelman gets us to a couple of problems that Baldwin helps us with, ifwe ask for his blessing.

First: If the sensual dominant of a performance is visual (if you’rethere, live, at the club), then the aural emerges as that which is givenin its fullest possibility by the visual: you hear Blackwell most clearlyin seeing him—the small kit, the softness and slow grace of his move-ment; or Cecil most clearly in the blur of his hands. Similarly, if thesensual dominant of the performance is aural (if you’re at home, in yourroom, with the recording), then the visual emerges as that which isgiven in its fullest possibility by the aural: you see Blackwell most clearlyin hearing the space and silence, the density and sound, that indicate

172 – VISIBLE MUSIC

and are generated by his movement; or Cecil most clearly in sound’santicipation of dance at, to, and away from the instrument. These arequestions of memory, descent, and projection. The visual and the auralare before one another. Blackwell gone, Cecil up ahead.

Second: Repression and ampliWcation. The repression of theknowledge of the hole in the signiWer is shadowed by another, not soeasily sensed repression of the knowledge of the whole in the signiWer.3

This is a repression of ampliWcation, of sound and, most especially, ofabounding, in the sense that Derrida employs, where the whole expandsbeyond itself in the manner of an ensemble that pushes conventionalontological formulation over the edge. The hole speaks of lack, division,incompleteness; the whole speaks of an extremity, an incommensura-bility of excess, the going past of the signiWer, neither its falling short,nor some simple equivalence. This understanding of the whole is notformed in relation to an impenetrable and exclusionary integrity but is,as Derrida puts it, “a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, aparasitical economy” that raises the most severe and difWcult concernsregarding the question of its own representation.4 We’ll return to thequestion of the relations between the part and the whole, the hole andthe whole. For now it’s enough to try to think the whole—as it has beenformulated and identiWed, in a certain kind of poststructuralist thought,as a necessarily Wctive, problematically restrictive, completeness—in itsrelation to and difference from the whole whose incompleteness isalways also a more than completeness.

These problems lie at the intersection of totality and the mater-iality of sound, where Guattari’s “a-signifying economy of language”5

encounters Derrida’s “parasitical economy” of “the law of the law ofgenre.” Baldwin is The Economist.

Let us hold him in our hearts and minds. Let us make him part of our

invincible black souls, the intelligence of our transcendence. Let our black

hearts grow big world absorbing eyes like his, never closed. Let us one

day be able to celebrate him like he must be celebrated if we are ever

to be truly self determining. For Jimmy was God’s black revolutionary

VISIBLE MUSIC – 173

mouth. If there is a God, and revolution his righteous natural expres-

sion. And elegant song the deepest and most fundamental commonplace

of being alive.6

In the eulogy he read at Baldwin’s funeral, Amiri Baraka speaks ofBaldwin’s “world absorbing eyes.” This text is supposed to be somethinglike a preface to an engagement with those eyes, with Baldwin’s gazeand the sound of that gaze as it is manifest in and as his very substance.That gaze’s sound and content, which carries with it all of the negativeweight of our history, also holds a blessing, a baraka, something allbound up with Baldwin’s being what Baraka called “God’s black revo-lutionary mouth” and more, and something all bound up with Baldwinbeing what Lee Edelman might call a homographer and more.7 Thischapter begins with an appreciation of the and more in Baldwin, an extrasubstance or content held in the generative, appositional, copresentnonconvergence of the ensemble of the senses and the ensemble of thesocial. This meeting is manifest, in one way, as a critique of what inBaraka all too easily becomes homophobic phonocentrism and of what inEdelman’s text “The Part for the (W)hole” (in part a reading of Baldwin’sJust above My Head) threatens to become an ocularcentric textualismthat is not but nothing other than Eurocentric. This section’s titlewould reXect such meeting and resound the echo of two compositionsand of two directions: their (non-)hybridity or, again, their genera-tive (non-)convergence. That’s what happens, for instance, in AnthonyBraxton’s recent quartet music or in a duet he recorded with DavidRosenboom called “Transference,” which I was trying to listen to whenI Wrst started to work on this: (the sound of [the]) ensemble in and as(the) ensemble’s internal space.

This is after what Guattari would call a “graft of transference”8

(and it’s important here to recall that transference is a kind of resistance;it’s that mode of being of the psychoanalytic encounter that is deter-mined by a syncopative interruption of interpretation):9 of the musicin black literature, of the black aesthetic and philosophical tradition inthe discourse of psychoanalysis, of all of these in the text of western


philosophy. These grafts are neither purely oppositional and impossiblenor some more or less possible hybridity or intersection. I also want tothink about sound and its occlusion and, therefore, to think about howcertain earlier versions of these grafts, both unconscious and conscious,operate with regard to sound, voice, their occlusion and exclusion andin light of attempts to remedy that occlusion or at least to mark it. Inthe end I want to talk about music, not as that which cannot be talkedabout but as that which is transferred and reproduced in literature asa function of the enabling disability of the literary representation ofaurality. I want to linger in the cut between word and sound, betweenmeaning and content, build me a willow cabin, so to speak, improvise,in a way that Lacan sounds but then talks, which is to say interpretshis way out of via what he calls “reducing the non-meaning.”10 Again, Iwould move with Baldwin in an attempt to reverse what Guattari callsthat “grave error on the part of the structuralist school to try to puteverything connected with the psyche under the control of the linguis-tic signiWer.”11 I would do much. I’ve got to augment in the ways of anappositional encounter, of what Nathaniel Mackey might call a “dis-crepant engagement.”

Recall Mackey’s formulations of “wounded kinship” and “sexual cut”and, along with the following passages from Lacan, let them stand in forthe terms and/or subjects of this encounter:

[A] certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial discord

betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the

neo-natal months. The objective notion of the anatomical incompleteness

of the pyramidal system and likewise the presence of certain humoral

residues of the maternal organism conWrm the view that I have formu-

lated as the fact of a real speciWc prematurity of birth in man.12

This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively

projects the formation of the individual into history. The mirror stage

is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufWciency to


anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the

lure of spatial identiWcation, the succession of phantasies that extends

from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call

orthopaedic—and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating

identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire men-

tal development. Thus to break out of the circle of the Innenwelt into the

Umwelt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego’s veriWcations.13

I’m interested in what appears to be a kind of black anticipatory doublingof some of the fundamental conceptual apparatuses of psychoanalysis: ofthe primal scene and of the mirror stage that might—via Baldwin—beseen to operate at the level of a racial as well as sexual determination thatis marked in the black tradition though largely unmarked or occluded inpsychoanalysis. One other thing that becomes clear is that black mirrorstages and/or primal scenes operate on different registers, at the levelof what might be called an extended infantilism despite the fact that inanother way there are no children here. A question of childhood, then—more vexed than ever when, in a black context, it is Wltered through aconceptual apparatus constructed out of terms like “primitivity,” “pre-history,” and “phylogenetic heritage”—is what I would address. One ofthe things I’d like to think about is how these terms operate within asort of love/hate relationship with childishness and with the childlike.What I’m talking about, though, is not some valorization of what mightbe called an arrested or deferred development but a radically criticalpreviousness vis-à-vis natality, a sexual cut that disrupts the familiarconstellation of formulations constructed around primitivity and infan-tilism as racial and sexual attributes.

This question of natality and of a catastrophic break that couldnot but be disruptive and augmentative of (dominant understandingsor formulations of ) identity and that would certainly be played outupon a Weld shaped, if not determined, by the scopic leads us to theissue of castration and its doubling. That question could be thought interms of wounded kinships or phantom limbs and it would, therefore,seem to lend itself to the kind of interpretation that either a Freudian


hermeneutic or a feminist, post-Freudian anti-hermeneutic might pro-vide.14 But this black castration is, in a fundamental sense, ante-hermeneutic, which is to say before (in every sense of the word) thepsychoanalytic, not only in the sense of a kind of anticipation of itsinsights but before the natal occasion, namely castration, out of whichthe psychoanalytic understandings of identiWcation and desire emerge.It is important to note in this regard that black castration is not just tobe seen as prospective Wgure and symbolic inability, since for the black tra-dition, castration is not just phantasmic possibility or introjection basedon a Xeeting glance at that which is read as sexual difference, but is alsothe proper name of an oft-repeated literal, historical, material event.Similarly the question of castration, in a way that is not only to beindexed to the psychoanalytic chain of disavowal and fetishization, leadsback to the question of the blessing, the baraka as Lacan terms it, a pos-sibility of augmentation, abounding, or of a dynamic whole that oper-ates in a complex relation with loss or lack or incompletion or statichole. Here, the baraka is an aurally infused gaze that manifests a bene-Wcence improvised through the opposition of prophylaxis and evil. Itis also a transfer of substance that jazz implies and performs. It is notthe prematurity (of ejaculation) that Adorno critiques—though there isnothing here if not ejaculation (and here one thinks of Hall Montana’sslow awakening from a dream in Just above My Head, about which morelater). And it is not quite that “dehiscence at the heart of the organism,a primal discord” that marks for Lacan the “fact of a real speciWc pre-maturity of birth in man,” though in the end there is nothing here if notthe individual’s projection into the augmentative atonality of a historyin and of resistance/transference, nothing if not the individual’s bearingsome “residues of the maternal.”

I want, though, not to deny (the mark of ) castration—as a consti-tutive and fundamental theoretical element of psychoanalysis and of thepsyche—but to think castration as the condition of possibility of an en-gagement that calls castration radically and, I think, irrevocably into anabounding or improvisational question. I want to listen to what sounddoes to interpretation and note how insurgent, anti- and ante-interpretive


song, correspondent to “neither time nor tune” bears the repressed,resistant, transferred content of the piercing sound—“the heart-rendingshriek”—of the black improvisation of the primal scene. Our passage(s)raise the question of castration’s relation to the problematics of readingand of meaning and the possibility of signiWcance at the level of whatabounds or augments meaning, the way in which nonmeaning rendersmeaning more signiWcant and the way this demands a critique of (psy-choanalytic) interpretation. The way such a critique is embedded inthe black radical aesthetic tradition, in the way it anticipates both aFreudian-phallic as well as a post-Freudian-anti-phallic reading and out-strips them both—to the extent that he is shaped by the complexityof his identiWcations as much as it is determined by the force of itsrepresentations and to the extent that it knows (or, at least, shows) howsound both shapes and cuts interpretive circles or communities—is cru-cial here and is what is implied in this notion of the ante-, the before,another interinanimation of “insufWciency and anticipation” that notonly cuts mirror stages and primal scenes, but destabilizes the very ideaof—need or desire for—suture.

And all of this is tied to those problematics of meaning in relationto the originary separation from the object that are themselves calledinto question vis-à-vis this doubling such that the entry into language,that entry into the symbolic order that takes away what it gives andis the condition of possibility and impossibility of the subject’s relationto the object, is doubled by an entry into another’s language, and theconcomitant theft and loss—in Amiri Baraka’s words—of one’s “ooomboom ba boom”15 that, just as it is seen as a cut or break that is easilyreconWgured as a loss, is also reconWgured as an augmentation—some-thing brought to the language one enters, by way of the language onehas lost—that bears the lineaments not only of the most abhorrentand horriWc deprivations and violations but also of the most gloriousmodes of freedom and justice, like the anarchic and anarchronic modesof expression and organization that are played, which is to say playedout, in The Music (wherein, Ellison says, if we linger, we might commitan action).


And this, in turn, leads to the question of the relation betweencastration and alienation, between castration, on the one hand, and dis-avowal and fetishization, on the other hand, in the Freudian and Marx-ian registers. Here we can begin to examine how a particular line ofpsychoanalytically inXuenced inquiry—say, from Adorno to Silverman—operates against the backdrop of these racial-historical determinationsof language and the background of a reduction of the phonic substanceof language that bends their analytics of aurality in the direction ofan overwhelming ocularcentrism. For Adorno, black aural culture isdeWned by its fetish character in a way similar to the deWnition of femalebody/voice that Silverman sees in classic cinema. After all, according toAdorno, “[p]sychologically, the primal structure of jazz may most closelysuggest the spontaneous singing of servant girls . . . [,] the domesticatedbody in bondage.”16 But I’m interested, here, in the insight Adorno’sdeafness carries: for what is borne in work of the black radical aesthetictradition—and not only at the site of its recitations of terror and viola-tion but also in the critical and metacritical discourse it produces on itsown productions—is nothing other than the cries of a servant girl, thematerial-phonic substance that is transferable but not interpretable fromeither inside or outside the circle, the aural content that infuses and trans-forms (our dominant understandings of ) primality, extremity, or exten-sion out from inside or outside. Here I want to establish black aurality asthe site of an improvisation through the structures both Silverman andAdorno talk about. Ultimately, I want to show how Baldwin’s baraka, hisblessing, moves in the tradition of the servant girl and in the encounterwith psychoanalysis and in light not just of castration but of augmenta-tion, of a beneWcent and song-producing prosthesis—the augmentationof vision with the sound that it has excluded, the augmentation of reasonwith the ecstasy it has dismissed—that improvises through the determi-nations of lack and alienation, not via some direct adequation betweenword and object, but through the object’s transferential reproduction inand as the (re)production of sound and of an ensemblic, dynamic total-ity. What I’m trying to talk about is another address of Lacan’s “ques-tion of a horn,” about which more in a minute. That address takes into


account those transferences of the servant girl’s scream in the blackmusical and literary traditions, the “afro-horn[s],” say, of Henry Dumasor of Albert Ayler, phallic instruments infused and reconWgured by themateriality (content-substance-objectivity) of the maternal and by theknowledge of freedom the experience of bondage affords.17

So that I want to trace a movement from the reduction of thephonic substance (of whose workings in texts from Descartes to SaussureDerrida writes in Of Grammatology and whose critical effects Edelmanassumes in his essay on Baldwin) to the denial of the mark/inscriptionof castration on the maternal body to the absenting or exclusion ofthe maternal, the body and the mark18 to “the inscription of ‘thehomosexual’ within a tropology that produces him in a determiningrelation to inscription itself” (that tropology being what Edelman refersto as “homographesis”).19 I want to think about the way that writing’sdescription of sound (the literary representation of aurality) is also ade-scription of sound, a writing out of sound, that corresponds bothwith the “unconscious denial that the maternal body is inscribed withthe mark of castration [that] is . . . the precondition, at the level of thesubject, for the philosophical exclusion or suppression of the maternal,the body, and the signifying mark”20 and with a denial, both consciousand unconscious, of the very idea of the whole. This requires that Iestablish an equivalence between the denial of writing or inscription—which is also a denial of castration—and the denial of the aural in writ-ing—an aurality that augments and redoubles castration, destabilizingits determinations: of meaning, disavowal, fetishization, alienation.Note, again, that this would be not a denial of castraton but an invagina-tive cut, a “sexual cut” of castration by way of aurality, one that carrieswith it the transferential mark of the anoriginal but insistently previousmateriality and maternity of otherwise occluded sensuality, otherwiseoccluded sound, otherwise occluded content, in logocentric traditionsand in their grammatological supplements.

Some of you may recall that this conception originated in a feature of

human behavior illuminated by a fact of comparative psychology. The


child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the

chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recog-

nize as such his own image in a mirror. This recognition is indicated

in the illuminative mimicry of the Aha-Erlebnis, which Köhler sees as

the expression of situational apperception, an essential stage of the act of

intelligence.

This act, far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey,

once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately re-

bounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experi-

ences in play the relation between movements assumed in the image and

the reXected environment, and between this virtual complex and the real-

ity it reduplicates—the child’s own body, and the persons and things,

around him.

This event can take place, as we have known since Baldwin, from

the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reXect upon

the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Unable as yet

to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support,

human or artiWcial (what in France we call a ‘trotte-bébé ’), he nevertheless

overcomes, in a Xutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support

and, Wxing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to

hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image21

Since every stick and stone was white and since you have not yet seen a mirror

you assume you are too until around the age of 5 or 6 or 7 . . .22

I was determined to be served or die; I wanted to kill her but wasn’t close enough

so I threw a glass into the mirror, and when it shattered, when the glass hit the

mirror, I woke up.23

TORT: No, I wanted you to say more about that temporality to which you

already referred once, and which presupposes, it seems to me, references that you

have made elsewhere to logical time.

LACAN: Look, what I noticed there was the suture, the pseudo-

identiWcation, that exists between what I called the terminal time of the


arrest of the gesture and what, in another dialectic that I called the dialec-

tic of identiWcatory haste, I put as the Wrst time, namely, the moment of

seeing. The two overlap, but they are certainly not identical, since one is

initial and the other is terminal.

I would like to say more about something which I was not able, for

lack of time, to give you the necessary indications.

This terminal time of the gaze, which completes the gesture, I

place strictly in relation to what I later say about the evil eye. The gaze

in itself not only terminates the movement, it freezes it. Take those dances

I mentioned—they are not always punctuated by a series of times of arrest

in which the actors pause in a frozen attitude. What is that thrust, that

time of arrest of the movement? Is it simply the fascinatory effect, in

that it is a question of dispossessing the evil eye of the gaze in order to

ward it off? The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the effect

of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the

subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortiWed. The anti-life, anti-

movement function of this terminal point is the fascinum, and it is pre-

cisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised

directly. The moment of seeing can intervene here only as a suture, a

conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic, and it is taken up again

in a dialectic, that sort of temporal progress that is called haste, thrust,

forward movement, which is concluded in the fascinum.

What I wish to emphasize is the total distinction between the

scopic register and the invocatory, vocatory, vocational Weld. In the scopic

Weld, the subject is not essentially indeterminate. The subject is strictly

speaking determined by the very separation that determines the break of

the a, that is to say, the fascinatory element introduced by the gaze.24

F. WAHL: You have left to one side a phenomenon that is situated, like the

evil eye, in the Mediterranean civilizations, and which is the prophylactic eye. It

has a protective function that lasts for the duration of a journey, and which is

linked, not to an arrest, but to a movement.

LACAN: What is prophylactic about such things is, one might say,

allopathic, whether it is a question of a horn, whether or not made of


coral, or innumerable other things whose appearance is clearer, like the

turpicula res, described by Varro, I think, which is quite simply a phallus.

For it is in so far as all human desire is based on the castration that the

eye assumes its virulent, aggressive function, and not simply its luring

function as in nature. One can Wnd among these amulets forms in which

a counter-eye emerges—this is homeopathic. Thus, obliquely, the so-

called prophylactic function is introduced.

I was thinking that in the Bible, for example, there must be pas-

sages in which the eye confers the baraka or blessing. There are a few

small places where I hesitated—but no. The eye may be prophylactic

but it cannot be beneWcent—it is maleWcent. In the Bible and even in

the New Testament, there is no good eye, but there are evil eyes all over

the place.25

I’m after a way of rethinking the relation between the mirror stage andthe fascinum/baraka of the gaze, to think the gaze as something otherthan necessarily maleWcent, but not by way of a simple reversal or inclu-sion within the agencies of looking; rather within another formulationof the sensual, within a holoesthetic nonexclusionarity that improvisesthe gaze by way of sound, the horn, that accompanies the blessing, thathas effects Lacan cannot anticipate26 in part because of his ocularcen-trism, because of the way his attention to language is always through animplicit and powerful visualization of the sign, a visualization never notconnected to the hegemony or law of the signiWer that Guattari decriesand would break. So I’m talking about something like the possibility ortrace of aurality in Baldwin’s gaze, conferred upon himself and others,the nonexclusion of the gaze’s aurality as the condition of possibilityof its blessing. But what’s the relationship between these representa-tions of the mirror stage? How is the process of identiWcation consti-tuted in black culture? Is there a black mirror stage? Is the plenitude ofLacan’s mirror stage always already an illusion, one that always alreadydemands compensation for or an impossible reconstitution of thatwhich it would constitute? Is this not all part of a process of decon-struction of the absolute singularity or alterity, the unitary trait, of the


individual or group? Is Lacan’s mirror stage simply the constitution ofa phantom or phantasmatic singularity, an illusory plenitude or fullness?Doesn’t Baldwin’s mirror stage divest us even of the possibility of thatillusion by bringing into the mix, precisely at the moment of its consti-tution, race such that the moment of the constitution of an originarydifferentiation or singularization is interminably deferred?

Listening to Lacan and interlocutor on the gaze, at the occlusionof sound, when the horn is dismissed or bracketed within the oscilla-tional economy of phallus/castration (the virtual or symbolic economyof a reiWed sexual difference and a reiWed relation of subject and object),one hears that what that bracketing forecloses remains foreclosed onlyuntil the before of Baldwin removes or redoubles or returns to opensound’s opening back up again. All this happens in the Mediterranean,as if—in the name of the Sheik and the Trojan—prophylaxis (or some-thing uncontrollable that requires it) had this site as its natural home;deeper still, as if that which would be prophylactic or protective ismerely phallic and aggressive, an aggression that is assured in and by aprior interpretive racialization of human desire’s basis in castration.The horn is dismissed as phallic, thought only in its immaterial, ifforceful, absence. Yet a kind of gap occurs due to the improvisationalorality and aurality of the seminar, the unequal exchange of questionand answer. This gap occurs when Lacan refers to those forms, thoseamulets,27 as potentially in excess of an understood or assumed econ-omy of visually and spatially determined meaning and difference. If thehorn—by way of the specter of an organized sound, a music—brings tobear on the sign’s visual/spatial regime a system of differences that doesnot signify, as Kristeva would say (though here, that this system wouldnot signify does not mean that it would not communicate or effect, pro-duce or induce affect, protect or ensure, endanger in the interest of somesaving power), then we can understand why Lacan would attempt tobracket it just as his readers, either for the sake of his readability or hisunreadability, bracket the noise he must have made, a noise connectednot only to aurality but to aurality in improvisation. This bracketingallows the requisite conclusion: there can be no beneWcent eye, that no


eye can convey a blessing, that the horn, reduced to a sign, a substitutefor the lost object, can only reveal the anxiety and aggression of a desireborn in castration. But the horn is what conveys the baraka, and thisblessing, bound up in the nonexclusion of sound from the holoestheticWeld, is what allows the possibility of a more than prophylactic gaze,that beneWcent and world-encompassing gaze, the baraka of whichBaraka speaks and sings. What is held and carried in that gaze is theeruptive content of a transferred history; the material substance of amusic that is more than aural: anticipatory, premature, insistently pre-vious, jazz.28 We have known this since Baldwin, since the man referredto in the index of the English translation of Écrits as “Baldwin, J.” Sincehim. J. Baldwin knew something about the way sound works, somethingabout the work of sound. Between or outside of or improvising throughprotection and arrest, what did Baldwin confer upon us when he lookedat us and what did he confer upon himself when he Wrst looked into hisown eyes?

Edelman operates within an occlusion of sound similar to that ofLacan’s, an occlusion that occurs sometimes in the name of a decon-struction of phonocentrism and always within a tradition of logocen-trism, which has at its heart a paradoxically phonocentric deafness. Andso, in spite of the value of his work, we’re still left with the question,how will we receive (a term of great importance to Edelman and to hisvalorization of a kind of ethics of mutual penetrability) or celebrate(as Baraka would have it) Baldwin? Now I am not advocating a readingthat would be a simple return or (re)capitulation to a metaphysics ofmeaningful voice, one that would parallel the rendering of homosexual-ity and blackness as secondary/sterile/parasitic that Edelman describes.Nevertheless, the primal scene must be heard; one must be attuned toits sound and perhaps, then, even to a real reformulation of, rather thandismissal of, spirit. Hear, for instance, recorded, if you will, in Leeming’sbiography, the devastating aurality of a Baldwinian primal scene that onewould invoke in order to justify the search for a homographic aurality inthe text, one that augments Edelman’s critique with sonic interruptions.


Baldwin remembered as one of the “most tragically absurd” moments

of his life lying in bed with a lover in Saint-Paul-de-Vence . . . both of

them crying as they listened to the sounds of Lucien [Happersberger,

the man Baldwin described as the love of his life] making love with the

lover’s supposed girlfriend in the room above.29

Now I’m not trying to say that Edelman is wholly unattuned to sound;indeed part of what I want to pay special, though brief, attention to hereis his reading of sound and music in Just above My Head. I am tryingto say that Baldwin, at least with regard to the question of politicsand also with regard to the importance of sound, in light of a desire tomove beyond the oscillation between resistance and domination, wouldhave at least been wary about anything like a kind of homographesisor negrographesis that didn’t give the phonê its due. At any rate, what Iwant to argue is that the nonexclusion of sound, the nonreduction ofnonmeaning, is tied to another understanding of literary resistance, onethat moves within and without the black tradition, activating the soundin a way that opens the possibility of a nonexclusion of sexual differencewhose exclusion has otherwise marked that tradition and that has beenan inescapable part of that tradition’s own scopophilia. His writing ispierced with screams and songs and prayers and cries and groans, theirmateriality, their maternity, and that’s important.

More importantly, these elements are not to be read, are not tobe thought in relation to a formalism that reduces (phonic) substancein the construction of a sound-image that is itself integrated into thesemiotic ground of the science of grammatology. As Derrida writes,“[W]ithout this reduction of phonic matter, the distinction betweenlanguage and speech, decisive for Saussure, would have no rigor.”30

And it is this particular mode of rigor that is decisive for Edelman tothe extent that his homographesis is an extension, via Derrida, of Saus-sure’s scientiWc project. And shortly we’ll note in Edelman’s readinghow the reduction of the phonic matter to a sound-image that is read-able, meaningful, and therefore held within the very visual economyhe attempts to disturb marks the reinscription of a phonocentrism—a


central remergence of the metaphysics of voice into the homographesisEdelman performs and sees Baldwin performing—that paradoxicallyrenders the text silent. Or, more precisely, substanceless, both withregard to the text’s materiality and its (immaterial, semantic) content.The reduction of the phonic substance that determines Edelman’s read-ing of Baldwinian aurality in its relation to the homographic distur-bance of “manhood” and the “ego” is important not simply because itmight serve to suppress what Houston Baker would call the text’s “racialpoetry,”31 a poetry he all too quickly aligns with an understanding of the“meaning” and “identity” of blackness that never escapes the very scopicdeterminations that, as Edelman rightly points out, connect Baker’swork to homophobic and racist regimes he would surely have intendedto resist. Rather, the reduction of phonic substance must be thought preciselybecause it iconically represents the exclusion of materiality in general whereinthe liberatory force of an invaginative racial poetry lies. In Of GrammatologyDerrida quotes Hjelmslev’s interpellation and extension of Saussure:“[s]ince language is a form and not a substance (Saussure), the glossemesare by deWnition independent of substance, immaterial (semantic, psycho-logical and logical) and material (phonic, graphic, etc.).”32 If Edelman’smode of reading is a further variation on Saussure’s formalism, and Ithink it is, how can it be adequate to Baldwin if Baldwin is, and I thinkhe is, substantial? Please note that this question is meant to initiatean augmentation, not a rejection, of the homographic project—a sub-stantial augmentation that will, in turn, make possible another kind ofencounter with Baldwin’s substance, with his im/materiality—both sen-sual and social. And note, too, that it would be wrong to suggest thatEdelman is unaware of the substance of Baldwin’s text that escapes thevisual-aural binary. Check the holosensual Weld that is created in thefollowing passage from Just above My Head:

Curious, the taste, as it came, leaping, to the surface: of Crunch’s prick,

of Arthur’s tongue, into Arthur’s mouth and throat. He was frightened,

but triumphant. He wanted to sing. The taste was volcanic. This taste,

the aftertaste, this anguish, and this joy had changed all tastes forever.


The bottom of his throat was sore, his lips were weary. Every time he

swallowed, from here on, he would think of Crunch, and this thought

made him smile as, slowly, now, and in a peculiar joy and panic, he allowed

Crunch to pull him up, upward, into his arms.

He dared to look into Crunch’s eyes. Crunch’s eyes were wet and

deep deep like a river, and Arthur found that he was smiling peace like a

river.33

That Weld is remarked by Edelman. We must remark the insistent inter-articulation of “reading” and “seeing” in Edelman’s remarks.

Fittingly, in light of this last remark, Arthur and Crunch conWrm their

new understanding of “identity” by performing gospel songs and hymns

identical to those they sang before they began their erotic involvement.

Now, however, what is patently the same is also, and at the same time, dif-

ferent; as Arthur and Crunch contain each other, so, too, do the various

“meanings” of their apparently identical songs. Like the homographic

sameness of two signiWers, visually indistinguishable from one another—

signiWers that are actually products of different histories and etymologies—

the “same” text now exhibits discontinuous, potentially contradictory

meanings that reXect its determination through contiguity to different

parts of the context that contains it. Thus the spiritual devotion implicit

in “So high, you can’t get over him” cohabits with the homoerotic speciWc-

ity of the song’s performance by Arthur and Crunch. And just as Arthur,

contemplating the aftertaste of Crunch’s ejaculation into his mouth, is

“frightened, but triumphant” and wants, as Baldwin declares, “to sing,” so

the experience of singing in the novel comes to Wgure the erotic exchange

of inside and outside, the taking in and giving back of a language seen as

the prototype of the “foreign” substance that penetrates, and constitutes,

identity.

To the extent, then, that Arthur and Crunch reinterpret “manhood”

and thus, in Western terms, subjectivity in its paradigmatic form, as

the ability to incorporate what is “foreign” without experiencing a loss of

integrity, and without being constrained (hetero)sexist either/or logic of


active and passive, they point to the partial understanding of “manhood”

that passes in dominant culture for the whole, and they disarticulate the

coercive “wholeness” of an identity based on fantasmic identiWcation with

a part. They thus make visible to the novel’s reader the invisible opera-

tion of différance that destabilizes every signiWer, offering a glimpse of the

process through which a signiWer like “manhood” can communicate the

singularity of a Wxed identity only where a community of “readers” has

learned how not to see the differences within that identity and its signi-

Wer both. “Perhaps history,” as Baldwin suggests, “is not to be found in

our mirrors, but in our repudiations: perhaps the other is ourselves”; and

as if generalizing from the mutual containment of Arthur in Crunch and

Crunch in Arthur, Baldwin expands on this supposition by declaring:

“Our history is each other. That is our only guide. One thing is absolutely

certain: one can repudiate, or despise, no one’s history without repudiat-

ing and despising one’s own. Perhaps that is what the gospel singer is

singing.”34

An initial reading reveals that Edelman subordinates taste and touch toaurality. More precisely, Edelman submits the tactile materiality thatinfuses Baldwin’s passage to a reading—which is to say, for Edelman, aseeing or visualization—of aurality that is already stripped of its par-ticular materiality precisely because the holism of the sensual ensembleis broken. That holism is collateral damage incurred in the assault onthe illusory totality of a synecdochically derived identity. What is hereinvisualized—that which displaces both the phonic and semantic sub-stance of language with a semiotic formalization and is, for Edelman,the making visible of the workings of différance—is described succinctlyby Derrida:

Différance is therefore the formation of form. But it is on the other hand the

being-imprinted of the imprint. It is well-known that Saussure distin-

guishes between the “sound-image” and the objective sound. He thus

gives himself the right to “reduce,” in the phenomenological sense, the

sciences of acoustics and physiology at the moment that he institutes the


science of language. The sound-image is the structure of the appearing

of the sound which is anything but the sound appearing. It is the sound-

image that he calls signiWer, reserving the name signiWed not for the thing,

to be sure (it is reduced by the act and the very ideality of language), but

for the “concept . . .” The sound-image is what is heard; not the sound

heard but the being-heard of the sound. Being-heard is structurally phe-

nomenal and belongs to an order radically dissimilar to that of the real

sound in the world.35

Derrida’s description is telling because it allows us to understand whatis a fundamental contradiction in Edelman’s work, namely, the valoriza-tion of language as prototypical substance from within a tradition of linguisticanalysis that thinks language as pure form. The attunement to sound is hererevealed as the literary experience of a psychic imprint; the substance of lan-guage is metaphorical and the substance of Baldwin only apparent. Thisis also to say that Edelman’s critique of an identity whose “coercive‘wholeness’ . . . [is] based on fantasmic identiWcation with a part” is itselfbased on the phantasmic identiWcation of the wholeness of the materialsubstance of Baldwin’s text with a part of that substance, namely therepresentation of song. This identiWcation is operative in the reading—which is to say visualization—of that singing and that reading’s neces-sary reduction of that singing’s phonic substance.

There is that in the phonic substance of Baldwin’s text that doesmuch more than “make visible to the novel’s reader the invisible oper-ation of différance.” Indeed, Edelman’s text carries, or more preciselytransfers, something whose substance is not merely formal. In order toget to that something it’s helpful to follow a certain clue embedded inGuattari’s move toward the indetermination of the “necessary” relationbetween the psyche and the signiWer and in his attention to those sonicextremities that infuse the signiWer, disturbing the reader’s visualiza-tion of it—disturbing the sound-image—with a reemergent substancethat marks not only its own irruptive penetration but that of othermodes of sensuality and desire as well.36 “Deep River” in the sound ofArthur’s gaze, in the wetness and depth of Crunch’s eyes, in the taste


of Crunch’s prick and cum, is tactile. Attention to the sound—and notmerely to the sound-image—of the gaze he represents gives us accessto the whole substance of Baldwin’s materiality; so we start, but do notWnish, there, where before us it remains to recall in our experience ofhim the shock of a blessing, a substantive transfer, from which homo-graphesis bars us unless it is augmented. What this requires is neither areduced emphasis on writing nor some new or more elaborately justi-Wed inattention to sound. Rather, an augmentation of reading’s atten-tion to the sound-image as Saussure thinks it, which would in turn leadto an augmentation of the experience of the audio-visual in its substan-tive im/materiality, which would in turn allow a fuller experience of theensemble of the senses as it is experienced in Baldwin’s writing. Impro-vising through the space between Baldwin’s texts and his audio-visualprojection in/on Wlm, one is held within the very distillate of aestheticexperience: an erotics of distant receptivity where, in this particularcase, phonic materiality opens to us its own invagination, a libidinaldrive toward ever greater unities of the sensual where materiality in itsmost general—which is to say substantive—sense is transmitted in theinterstice between text and all it represents and can’t represent and theaudio-visual and all that it bears and cannot bear. When in this space amaterial tactility is transferred, the affective encounter of the ensembleof the senses and the ensemble of the social is given as a possibility ofthis erotic drive that now can be theorized in its most intense relationto the drive for, and the knowledge of, freedom.

At one point in Karen Thorsen’s Wlm James Baldwin: The Price of theTicket, Baldwin says, “I really do believe in the New Jerusalem.” Thisfaith—the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseenbut heard (things therefore operating in the interruption of an occular-centric order, a visual code or overdetermined politics of looking thatlocks in a certain oppositional encounter that Baldwin sang against)—is manifest as an ongoing concern with how you sound, where the cri-tique of sound’s occlusion is all bound up with being, as Baraka says, inthe tradition, the tradition where the development of society is the focus


of art, the tradition where The Music disrupts and reorganizes theforms of sensual expression in the interest of that development. But it isalso the evidence of things unheard, something transferred not only inthe sound but in the ensemblic materiality of that world-encompassinggaze that sound only indicates. This something is not in the audio-visualexperience of Baldwin or in the literary experience of his texts but insomething that is really even before and in improvisation of Baldwin andof these formal projections of Baldwin, something upon which he impro-vises, something transferred to him from the way back and way beforewounded kinship, forced and stolen labor, forced and stolen sexuality.At the risk of being misleading, I would think the more acute attentionto what is transferred, to sound + more (not lyric but song + more) inwriting and/or Wlm and what it opens up in them, as another and moreintense encounter with the music, where music is understood as contentthat irrupts into generic form, enacting a radical disorganization of thatform.37 To sustain the music would be to hold on to another under-standing of organization, to improvise another form in extension and inthe interest of augmentative musical content. Sustenance, encounter-ing. As Baldwin knows, as Edelman knows both because and in spite ofthe analytic he employs and to which he is given, to receive the blessingof this substance—to see and hear and touch and smell and taste it; toreceive the gift that does not cohere but exists in its abounding of itsown internal space; to receive and in so doing to acknowledge the factof the whole as a kind of distance: this is what it is to linger in the music.

Black Mo’nin’ in the Sound of the Photograph

In her essay, “‘Can you be BLACK and look at this’: Reading the RodneyKing Video(s),” Elizabeth Alexander recites a narrative:

Here is the story in summary: In August 1955, in Money, Mississippi, a

fourteen-year-old Chicago black boy named Emmett Till, nicknamed

“Bobo,” was visiting relatives and was shot in the head and thrown in the

river with a mammoth cotton gin fan tied around his neck, for allegedly

whistling at a white woman. In some versions of the story, he was found


with his cut-off penis stuffed in his mouth. His body was shipped to

Chicago, and his mother [Mamie Till Bradley] decided he should have an

open casket funeral; the whole world would see what had been done to

her son. According to the Chicago-based, black newsweekly Jet, hundreds

of thousands of mourners “in an unending procession, later viewed the

body” at the funeral home. A photograph of Till in the casket—his head

mottled and swollen to many times its normal size—ran in Jet, and largely

through that medium, both the picture and Till’s story became legendary.

The caption of the close-up photograph of Till’s face read: “Mutilated

face of victim was left unretouched by the mortician at the mother’s

request. She said she wanted ‘all the world’ to witness the atrocity.”38

And here are two passages from Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook that invokea sound correspondent to the massive implications of the image Alexan-der has brought again into view and into question:

I’m especially impressed by its long overdue disinterment of the

occult, heretofore inchoate arcana intuitively buried within the reaches—

the wordless reaches—of the black singer’s voice. Would it be going too

far to say that in your essay the black falsetto has in fact found its voice?

(Forgive me if I embarrass you.) In any case, the uncanny coincidence is

that the draft of your essay arrived just as I’d put on a record by Al Green.

I’ve long marveled at how all this going on about love succeeds in alchem-

izing a legacy of lynchings—as though singing were a rope he comes eter-

nally close to being strangled by.

. . . One point I think could bear more insistent mention: What you

term “the dislocated African’s pursuit of a meta-voice” bears the weight

of a gnostic, transformative desire to be done with the world. By this I

mean the deliberately forced, deliberately “false” voice we get from some-

one like Al Green creatively hallucinates a “new world,” indicts the

more insidious falseness of the world as we know it. (Listen, for example,

to “Love and Happiness.”) What is it in the falsetto that thins and threat-

ens to abolish the voice but the wear of so much reaching for heaven? At

some point you’ll have to follow up this excellent essay of yours with a


treatment of the familial ties between the falsetto, the moan and the

shout. There’s a book by a fellow named Heilbut called The Gospel Sound

you might look into. At one point, for example, he writes: “The essence

of the gospel style is a wordless moan. Always these sounds render the

indescribable, implying, “Words can’t begin to tell you, but maybe moan-

ing will.” If you let “word” take the place of “world” in what I said above

the bearing this has on your essay should become pretty apparent. (Dur-

ing his concert a few weeks back Lambert quoted an ex-slave in Louisiana

as having said, “The Lawd done said you gotta shout if you want to be

saved. You gotta shout and you gotta moan if you wants to be saved.” Take

particular note of the end of “Love and Happiness,” where Green keeps

repeating, “Moan for love.”) Like the moan or the shout, I’m suggesting,

the falsetto explores a redemptive, unworded realm—a meta-word, if you

will—where the implied critique of the momentary eclipse of the word

curiously rescues, restores and renews it: new word, new world.39

Flaunted Fifth heard the noise of a helicopter overhead. He noticed

the cops in the police car looking this way. The emotional Wgure he

absentmindedly toyed with was given an abruptly ominous edge by the

setting sun, the helicopter overhead and the police car circling the block,

all of which put an inverse halo around it. A panicky rush ran thru him as

the cops continued to look his way. He couldn’t help remembering that

several black men had been killed by the L.A. police in recent months,

victims of a chokehold whose use there were now efforts to outlaw. The

V-shaped warmth in the crook of his right arm seemed to detach itself,

rise up and, like an ironic boomerang, press itself against the front of his

neck. He imagined himself held in the sweaty crook of a cop’s arm.

It was hard not to be overwhelmed by the lethal irony which

invaded everything. Flaunted Fifth was suddenly haunted by once having

written that the use of the falsetto in black music, the choked-up ascent

into a problematic upper register, had a way, as he’d put it, of “alchemiz-

ing a legacy of lynchings.” He’d planned to make use of this idea again

in his lecture/demonstration, but the prospect of a cop’s arm around his

neck reminded him that every concept, no matter how Wgural or sublime,


had its literal, dead-letter aspect as well. It now seemed too easy to speak

of “alchemy,” too easy not to remember how inescapably real every lynch-

ing had been. He’d always thought of himself as an advocate of spirit. He

should have known the letter might someday do him in.

The ominous edge he picked up on was also, he realized, an

attribute of spirit. Overtones and resonances inhabited the letter, causing

it to creak like the Xoorboards and doors in a haunted house. That the

emotional triad he absentmindedly toyed with, the triangulation he’d

made a note of to himself, should creak with overtones of strangulation

came as no surprise. That Namesake Epigraph #4 should be haunted by

patriarchal patrol cars and helicopters, that it should creak with patriar-

chal prohibitions against public speech, equally came as no surprise. It

all conWrmed a “creaking of the spirit” he’d heard referred to in a song

from the Bahamas many years before. That the creaking might kill was

the price one occasionally paid. “No blues without dues,” he reminded

himself, making another mental note for his pilot radio show.40

Some attribute to Emmett Till—which is to say to his death, which isto say to the famous picturing and display, staging and performance, ofhis death or of him in death—the agency that set in motion this nation’sprofoundest political insurrection and resurrection, the resurrection ofreconstruction, a second reconstruction like a second coming of theLord.41 If this is true, how is it true? On this question Alexandersubscribes to James Baldwin’s formulation, in The Evidence of ThingsNot Seen, that Till’s murder—which in its particularity is not unlike avast chain of such events that stretches across a long history of brutalviolence—can stand out, resonate, or be said to produce effects, onlybecause of the moment of its occurrence, a moment possible only afterthe beginning of the insurrection and resurrection it is claimed to havesparked. As Alexander remarks, Baldwin’s claims regarding this matterare astute: Till’s death bears the trace of a particular moment of panicwhen there was massive reaction to the movement against segregation.(That particular moment of panic is a point on an extended trajectory,where that panic seems almost always to have been—among other things


though this is not just one thing among others—sexual. So that themovement against segregation is seen as a movement for miscegenationand, at that point, whistling or the “crippled speech” of Till’s “Bye,baby” cannot go unheard.42 This means we’ll have to listen to it alongwith various other sounds that will prove to be nonneutralizable andirreducible.) The fact that whatever force Till’s death exerted was notoriginary does not mean, however, that that force wasn’t real. For evenif his death marks panic and even if that panic had already led to thedeaths of so many so that that death was already haunted, its force onlythe animating spirit of a train of horrors, something happened. Some-thing real—in that it might have been otherwise—happened. So thatyou need to be interested in the complex, dissonant, polyphonic affec-tivity of the ghost, the agency of the Wxed but multiply apparent shade,an improvisation of spectrality, another development of the negative.All these have to do with another understanding of the photograph andof a deferral of some inevitable return to the ontological that wouldoperate in the name of a utopian vision and in the sharpest critique ofthose authoritarian modes of (false) differentiation and (false) univer-salization (ultimately, the same thing) that seem to have ontology orthe ontological impulse as their condition of possibility and seem toindicate that that impulse or activity could never have ended up in anyother way. So I’m interested in what a photograph—what this photo-graph—does to ontology, to the politics of ontology, and to the pos-sibility and project of a utopian politics outside of ontology.

How can this photograph challenge ontological questioning? Byway of a sound and by way of what’s already there in the decision to dis-play the body, to publish the photograph, to restage death and rehearsemo(ur)nin(g). This includes a political imperative that is never discon-nected from an aesthetic one, from a necessary reconstruction of thevery aesthetics of photography, of documentary and, therefore, of truth,revelation, enlightenment, as well as of judgment, taste and, therefore,of the aesthetic itself. Mackey moves toward this and yet what is madein such sounding, or, rather the theory and theorist of such making, ishaunted by a destruction she or it can never assimilate or exhaust. And


this is not just about some justiWcation, as if the blues were worth it.Rather you have to think about the fact that an aesthetic appropriationcould be said to desacrilize the legacy of lynchings, precisely by way ofan “alchemizing” that seems to fetishize or Wgure on the literal, on theabsolute fact and reality of so many deaths while, at the same time, con-tinually opening the possibility of redemption in out sensuality. Whichis to say that the blues are not worth the dues pai(n: trace of somethingsomething made me type; I had to leave it in: Payne: it’ll come backlater)d in order to produce them, but they are part of the condition ofpossibility of the end of such extortion. So this is about the cut musicenacts on the image and after the fact of a set of connections betweendeath and the visual, between looking and retribution—as arrest, abduc-tion, and abjection. What did the hegemony of the visual have to dowith the death of Emmett Till? What effect did the photograph of hisbody have on death? What affect did it send? How did the photographand its reproduction and dissemination break the hegemony of thevisual? “Cousins remembered him as ‘the center of attention’ who ‘likedto be seen. He liked the spotlight,’” but he’ll be heard, too, brokenspeech and talking wind by a cry from outside, interior exteriority of thephotograph.43

In positing that this photo and photographs in general bear aphonic substance, I want to challenge not only the ocularcentrism thatgenerally—perhaps necessarily—shapes theories of the nature of pho-tography and our experience of photography but that mode of semioticobjectiWcation and inquiry that privileges the analytic-interpretativereduction of phonic materiality and/or nonmeaning over somethinglike a mimetic improvisation of and with that materiality that moves inexcess of meaning.44 This second challenge assumes that the critical-mimetic experience of the photograph takes place most properly withina Weld structured by theories of (black) spectatorship, audition, andperformance. These challenges are also something of a preface to suchtheory and attempt to work out a couple of that theory’s most crucialelements: the anti-interpretive nonreduction of nonmeaning and thebreakdown of the opposition between live performance and mechanical


reproduction. All this by way of an investigation of the augmentationof mourning by the sound of moaning, by a religious and political for-mulation of morning that animates the photograph with a powerfullymaterial resistance. We’ve got to try to understand the connectionbetween that resistance and political movement, locating that move-ment’s direction toward new universalities held within the difference/sof phonic substance, in the difference of the accent that cuts and aug-ments mourning and morning, a difference semiotics has heretoforethought either to be fatal to its desire for universality or proof of thefoolishness and political and epistemological danger of that desire.

There is the trace of what remains to be discovered, a topic, a path I’mtrying to take that moves through a shudder I can never escape whengazing, or even after the fact of an arrested and arresting glance, atthe broken face of Emmett Till. Looking at Emmett Till is arrested byovertonal reverberations; looking demurs when looking opens onto anunheard sound that the picture cannot secure but discovers and ontoall of what it might be said to mean that I can look at this face, thisphotograph.45 This is to say not only look at it but look at it in the con-text of an aesthetics, look at it as if it were to be looked at, as if it wereto be thought, therefore, in terms of a kind of beauty, a kind of detach-ment, independence, autonomy, that holds open the question of whatlooking might mean in general, what the aesthetics of the photographmight mean for politics and what those aesthetics might have meantfor Mamie Bradley in the context of her demand that her son’s face beseen, be shown, that his death and her mourning be performed.

Emmett Till’s face is seen, was shown, shone. His face wasdestroyed (by way of, among other things, its being shown: the memoryof his face is thwarted, made a distant before-as-after effect of itsdestruction, what we would never have otherwise seen). It was turnedinside out, ruptured, exploded, but deeper than that it was opened. Asif his face were the truth’s condition of possibility, it was opened andrevealed. As if revealing his face would open the revelation of a funda-mental truth, his casket was opened, as if revealing the destroyed face


would in turn reveal, and therefore cut, the active deferral or ongoingdeath or unapproachable futurity of justice. As if his face would de-construct justice or deconstruct deconstruction or deconstruct death,though this inWnite and circular chain seems too muddled, too crazy,too twisted or clotted, as if it, too, were in need of another cut, it wasshown. As if that face revealed “the beginning of death in cut time”as if this was a death unlike other deaths, a death that prompts a mourn-ing whose rehearsal is also a refusal, a death to end all deaths or all otherdeaths but one, his face was destroyed by its display.46 His casket wasopened, his face was shown, is seen—now in the photograph—andallowed to open a revelation that Wrst is manifest in the shudder theshutter continues to produce, the trembling, a general disruption ofthe ways in which we gaze at the face and at the dead, a disruption ofthe oppressive ethics and coercive law of reckless eyeballing, recklesswhistling, which contains within it a call, the disruption of the dis-ruption that would have captured, an arrest of the spirit that arrests, arepetitive close.47 Memory—bound to the way the photograph holds upwhat it proposes, stops, keeps—is given pause because what we thoughtwe could look at for the last time and hold holds us, captures us, anddoesn’t let us go. And why is the memory of this mutilated face, recon-Wguration of what was embedded in some furtive and partial glance’srefusal, so much more horrible, the distortion magniWed even morethan the already incalculable devastation of the actual body? Does theblindness held in the aversion of the eye create an insight that ismanifest as a kind of magniWcation or intensiWcation of the object—asif memory as affect and the affect that forges distorted or intensiWedmemory cascade off one another, each multiplying the other’s force? Ithink this kind of blindness makes music.

The fear of another castration is all bound up in this aversionof the eye. Emmett Till’s death marks a double time, rhythm-a-ning,redoubled nothing-ing, dead and castrated. But his mother, absent, pres-ent, reopens or leaves open the wound that is redoubled, the nothingthat is redoubled in her son’s murder. Ms. Bradley opens, leaves open,reopens, the violent, ritual, sexual cutting of his death by the leaving


open of the casket, by the unretouching of the body, by the body’s photo-graph, by the photograph’s transformation in memory and nightmareof which many speak (for instance Roland Barthes, about whom morelater). That leaving open is a performance. It is the disappearance of thedisappearance of Emmett Till that emerges by way of exhibiting kin-ship’s wounds (themselves always reWgured and reWnished in and as andby exogamous collision). It is the ongoing destruction of the ongoingproduction of (a) (black) performance, which is what I am, which iswhat you are or could be if you can listen while you look. If he seems tokeep disappearing as you look at him it’s because you look away, whichis what makes possible and impossible representation, reproduction,dream. And there is a sound that is seemingly not there in this per-formance that this performance is about; but not just a sound sincewe are also concerned with what that sound would invoke—immortalor utopian longings, though not the utopianism of a past made present,not the recovery of a loss, and not just a negation of the present either,in the form of an ongoing displacement of the concrete. Rather, here isan abundance—in abundance—of the present, an abundance of afWrma-tion in abundance of the negative, in abundance of disappearance.

Such is the aesthetic cut, invasive evasion, shock of the shock,adding form and color to a verbal discourse, adding extensional cry andsound to the word’s visualization. An image from which one turns isimmediately caught in the production of its memorialized, re-memberedreproduction. You lean into it but you can’t; the aesthetic and philo-sophical arrangements of the photograph—some organizations of andfor light—anticipate a looking that cannot be sustained as unalloyedlooking but must be accompanied by listening and this, even thoughwhat is listened to—echo of a whistle or a phrase, moaning, mourning,desperate testimony and Xight—is also unbearable. These are the com-plex musics of the photograph. This is the sound before the photograph:

Scream inside and out, out from outside, of the image. Bye, baby.Whistling. Lord, take my soul. Redoubled and reanimating passion, thepassion of a seeing that is involuntary and uncontrollable, a seeing thatredoubles itself as sound, a passion that is the redoubling of Emmett


Till’s passion, of whatever passion would redeem, cruciWxion, lynch-ing, middle passion, passage. So that looking implies that one desiressomething for this photograph. So that mourning turns. So that thelooker is in danger of slipping, not away, but into something less com-fortable than horror—aesthetic judgment, denial, laughter, some out andunprecedented reXection, movement, murder, song. So that there isan inappropriable ecstatics that goes along with this aesthetics—one istaken out, like in screams, fainting, tongues, dreams. So perhaps she wascounting on the aesthetic.

This aural aesthetic is not the simple reemergence of the voice of pres-ence, the visible and graphic word. The logos that voice implies andrequires has been complicated by the echo of transgressive whistle,abortive seduction, stuttered leave-taking, and by reconstructive over-tones of mo’nin’. Something is remembered and repeated in such com-plications. Transferred. To move or work through that something, toimprovise, requires thinking about morning and how mourning sounds,how moaning sounds. What’s made and destroyed. We’ll have to dothis while keeping in mind all that remains urgent and needful and openin the critique of phonologocentrism Derrida initiates. Nevertheless,we’ve got to cut the ongoing “reduction of the phonic substance” whoseorigin is untraceable, but that is at least as old as philosophy, at leastas old as its paradoxically interinanimate other, phonocentrism, andpredates any call for its being set into motion, either in Descartes orSaussure or in Derrida’s critical echo of them. The refusal to neutralizethe phonic substance of the photograph rewrites the time of the photo-graph, the time of the photograph of the dead. The time of the soundof the photograph of the dead is no longer irreversible, no longervulgar, and, moreover, not only indexed to rhythmic complication butto the extreme and subtle harmonics of various shrieks, hums, hollers,shouts, and moans. What these sounds and their times indicate is the wayinto another question concerning universality, a reopening of the issueof a universal language by way of this new music so that now it’s pos-sible to accommodate a differentiation of the universal, of its ongoing


reconstruction in sound as the differential mark, divided and abundant,dividing and abounding. But how many people have really listened to thisphotograph? Hieroglyphics, phonetic writing, phonography—where isthe photograph placed in all this?

Black mo’nin’ is the phonographic content of this photograph.And the whistle is just as crucial as the moan; train whistle, maybe; hiswhistle carrying the echo of the train that took his particular originsnorth, the train that brought him home and took him home and broughthim home. There’s a massive itinerancy here, a fugitivity that breakingonly left more broke, broken and unbroken circle of escape and return.48

And the gap between them, between their modes of audibility vis-à-visthe photograph, is the difference within invagination between whatcuts and what surrounds, invagination being that principle of impuritythat, for Derrida, marks the law of the law of genre where the set orensemble or totality is constantly improvised by the rupturing andaugmentative power of an always already multiply and disruptively pres-ent singularity. So that speech is broken and expanded by writing; sothat hieroglyphics is affected by phonetic script; so that a photographexerts itself on the alphabet; so that phonographic content infuses thephoto. And this movement doesn’t mark some orbital decay in whichsigniWcation inevitably returns to some simple vocal presence; ratherit’s the itinerary of the force and movement of signiWcation’s outside.The implications of this aural aesthetic—this phonographic rewritingof/in the photograph—are crucial and powerful then, because theymark something general about the nature of a photograph and a perfor-mance—the ongoing universality of their absolute singularity—that isitself, at least for me, most clearly and generously given in black pho-tography and black performance. (This is, for instance, what Ma/ckeyalways brings, always knows.)

Blackness and maternity play huge roles in the analytic of photographyRoland Barthes lays down in Camera Lucida, Barthes’s extended andelegaic meditation on the essence of photography that revolves aroundan unreproducible, unobservable photograph of his mother as a young


child (the “Winter Garden Photograph”), a woman remarkable toBarthes in part because, he says, she made no observations.49 Blacknessis the site or mark of the ideal object, the ideal spectator (and theseare everything for Barthes’s analytic since the doing or operation ofphotography is bracketed and set aside early on in Camera Lucida).Blackness is the embodiment of a naïveté that would move Barthes, theself-styled essential phenomenologist, back before culture to some pureand unalloyed looking.50 The paradox, here, is that the reduction phe-nomenology desires seems to require a regression to a prescientiWc statecharacterized by what Husserl, after Hegel, would call the incapabilityof science. Those who are incapable of science are those who are out-side history, but that exteriority is precisely the desired starting pointfor phenomenology, which would move not through philosophical tra-dition but directly toward and in the things themselves. And indeed, thisis how empire makes phenomenology possible, Wguring a simplicitystructured by regression, return, and reduction reWgured as reWnement.Empire’s mother Wxation is phenomenology’s obsession with blackness.Blackness is situated precisely at the site of the condition of possibilityand impossibility of phenomenology and, for Barthes, that’s cool becausethe object and the spectator of photography reside there as well. Thisinterstitial no-space is where photography lives, this point of embarka-tion for the europhallic journey to the interior, to the place of the other,the dark continent, the motherland that is always coded as an imperialdescent into self. This regressive return to “that-has-been” and/or towhere-you-been is the staging area for the performance of that violentand ruptural collision that is both the dramatic life of blackness and theopening of what is called modernity.51 The lynching and photograph-ing of Emmett Till, the reproductive display of his photographed bodyby his mother, the Barthesian theory of photography that is foundedin part on a silencing invocation of that mother and of his, are all partof the ongoing production of that performance. It ought not be sur-prising, then, that Barthes’s analysis in Camera Lucida is structured bya set of problematic moves: a disavowal of the historical in photogra-phy that reduces it to a Weld of merely “human interest”; a Wguring of


photographic historicality as overwhelmed by that univocal intentional-ity of the photographer that can only ever result in “a kind of generalenthusiastic commitment . . . without special acuity”; an ontological dif-ferentiation between photography and the photograph; and a semioticneutralization of the unorderable or nonmeaningful phonic substanceof photography.52 It is especially the Wrst and last of these elementsthat emerge here:

The photograph is unary when it emphatically transforms “reality” with-

out doubling it, without making it vacillate (emphasis is a power of cohe-

sion): no duality, no indirection, no disturbance. The unary Photograph

has every reason to be banal, “unity” of composition being the Wrst rule

of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: “The subject,” says one

handbook for amateur photographers, “must be simple, free of useless

accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.”

News photographs are very often unary (the unary photograph is

not necessarily tranquil). In these images, no punctum: a certain shock

but no disturbance; the photograph can “shout,” not wound. These jour-

nalistic photographs are received (all at once), perceived. I glance through

them, I don’t recall them; no detail (in some corner) ever interrupts my

reading: I am interested in them (as I am interested in the world), I do not

love them.53

Barthes’s turn from the vulgar, unary photography of the shout andtoward the reWned photography of the prick or wound is tied to anontological questioning that is founded on the unreproducibility of aphotograph and the theological veiling of the original in the interestof a theory of photographic signiWcation.54 Against the backdrop ofEmmett Till, the silencing of a photograph in the name of that inter-stitial space between The Photograph and Photography is also thesilencing dismissal of a performance in the name of that interstitialspace between Performance and Performativity. And, again, paradoxesare here produced seemingly without end, so that Barthes’s critiqueof the unary photograph is based on the assumption of the unary


sensuality of photography. And this is a prescriptive assumption—pho-tography ought to be sensually unary, ought not shout so that it canprick. Wounding photography is absolutely visual; that’s the only wayyou can love it.

So what’s the relationship between the necessary presence of theinterinanimation of naïve blackness and pre-observational motherhoodin Barthes’s theory and the necessary absence of sound? Perhaps it isthis: that the necessary repression—rather than some naturalizedabsence—of phonic substance in a general semiotics applies to the semi-otics of photography as well; that the semiotic desire for universality,which excludes the difference of accent by excluding sound in the searchfor a universal language and a universal science of language, is manifestin Barthes as the exclusion of the sound/shout of the photograph;and, in the fundamental methodological move of what-has-been-called-enlightenment, we see the invocation of a silenced difference, a silentblack materiality, in order to justify a suppression of difference in thename of (a false) universality.

In the end, though, neither language nor photography nor per-formance can tolerate silence. Which is to say that the universalitiesthese names would mark exist only in the singularities of a language, aphotograph, a performance, singularities that cannot live in the absenceof sound. Repressed accent returns precisely in the doubling that thesethings require, that the theory of these things demand; so that soundand recording are fundamentally connected in their disruptive neces-sity to language, photography, and performance. This aural aesthesis iswhat she counts on to intensify the politics of the performance whoseproduction she extends. The meaning of a photograph is cut and aug-mented by a sound or noise that surrounds it and pierces its frame. Andif, as Barthes suggests, that meaning or essence or noeme is death, the“that-has-been of the photographic object,” then sound disturbs it in theinterest of a resurrection. The content of the music of this photograph,like that of black music in general according to Amiri Baraka, is life, isfreedom. The music and theater of a black photograph is erotic: thedrama of life in the photograph of the dead.


So what’s the difference between the son’s inability to reproducethe photograph of his dead mother and the mother’s insistence on thereproduction of the photograph of her dead son? The difference hasto do with distinguishable stances toward universality, with what thediscovery of a performance or a photograph has to do with universal-ity, with the meaningful and illusory difference and relation betweenPerformance and Performativity, the Photograph and Photography. If“the Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for[Barthes], utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.”55 Thisimpossible science, the unique and universal word or logos, is achievedonly in a kind of solipsism, only in the memory that activates the uniquephotograph’s capacity to wound. Meanwhile, Ms. Bradley sidesteps (byway of an insistent publicity wherein is carried the echo of whistling andmo’nin’; in the interest of getting to some other—which is to say real—place) the utopic intersection of hermeneutics, phenomenology, andontology that mark the origin and limit of Barthes’s desire. For Barthesthe inability and/or unwillingness to discover a photograph is driven bythe positing of a universality and singularity that can only be mourned;for Ms. Bradley the discovery of a photograph in the fullness of itsmultiple sensuality moves in the drive for a universality to come, onecalled by what is in and around the photograph—black mo’nin’.

About twenty-Wve years before Camera Lucida, in an essay called “TheGreat Family of Man,” Barthes made some assumptions in the form ofa question regarding what “the parents of Emmet [sic] Till, the youngNegro assassinated by the Whites” would have thought about the GreatFamily of Man and the celebrated traveling photographic exhibit calledThe Great Family of Man.56 He uses those assumptions to argue forthe necessity for progressive humanism of an ongoing historicization ofnature rather than an uncritical photo-afWrmation of certain universalfacts like birth and death. After all, he writes, “to reproduce death orbirth tells us, literally, nothing. For these natural facts to gain access toa true language, they must be inserted into a category of knowledgewhich means postulating that one can transform them, and precisely


subject their naturalness to our human criticism.”57 Indeed, for Barthes,the failure of such photography lies in its inability to show

whether or not the child is born with ease or difWculty, whether or not

his birth causes suffering to his mother, whether or not he is threatened

with a high mortality rate, whether or not such and such a future is open

to him: this is what your exhibition should be telling people, instead of

an eternal lyricism of birth. The same goes for death: must we really

celebrate its essence once more, and thus risk forgetting that there is still

so much we can do to Wght it? It is this very young, far too young power

that we must exalt, and not the sterile identity of “natural” death.58

At the end of his career, however, Barthes produced a text that requiresthat we ask how a critique of the suppression of the determining weightof history is left behind for a stance that is nothing if not ahistorical.Where history and that singularity that exists as a function of depth/interiority, a certain incursion into the interior of the photograph andof identity, merge in “The Great Family of Man,” history and singular-ity are reconWgured each in relation to the other in Camera Lucida.There, history exists only in relation to the sovereign ego that is givenand represented by the wounding, arresting force of the photographicpunctum, the placement of the interiority of a subject on endless trial.59

Where difference was once tied to the historical injustices it both struc-tures and is structured by, now it marks only the uniqueness of an ego,is “that time when we were not born,” or, more particularly, “the timewhen my mother was alive before me.”60 And, indeed, the representationof injustice, of historical alienation, is now conWgured only as banality.This conWguration marks the return, paradoxically, of an empty human-ism of death (and birth) that elsewhere and earlier Barthes had critiqued.The photograph as such is now just the universal visual fact of death, ofpastness, of that-has-been, of the essence or noeme of photography that,again, is the object of Barthe’s analytic desire. On the other hand, a pho-tograph will remain, for him, not invisible but simply unreproducible.The fundamental absence of depth, held now in the very form of the


print, allows only the sad gesture of turning the photograph over. Theappeal to the possibility of a particular identity’s historical materialityis transformed into the Xat memorialization of the photograph’s train.This analytic is shaped by the recrudescence of that humanism thatmarks what Louis Althusser called “the international of decent feel-ings”;61 though here feeling is numbed by a violent egocentrism. Anintensely melancholic phenomenology of photography emerges fromthat egocentrism, one in which what might be called the loss of historicalparticularity or of the particularity of a photograph is displaced by theloss of the desire for these objects and for the object as such.

But there is already something amiss in “The Great Family ofMan”; an opposition between the modes of production of the humanand human essence that is precisely what Ms. Bradley cuts. It is the splitin which totality is a/voided in the interest of historical particularityand it is displaced, in Camera Lucida, by a reiWed ontological concernwith studium and punctum, a phenomenological privileging of essencethat reveals history to be fundamentally personal, fundamentally deictic,and thus still forecloses not only the totality Barthes already disavowsin the earlier text but the singularity he desires in the later one. In otherwords, historical particularity becomes what Bertrand Russell wouldhave called egocentric particularity. So that this is about how listen-ing carefully to the muted sound of the photograph as it resonates inBarthes’s texts on photography, through his repression and denigrationof it, gives you some clues about the inevitability of a certain develop-ment in which egocentrism and ontologism, perhaps each to the other’sregret, are each tied to the other in theory, which is to say, in episte-mologies of unalloyed looking. And perhaps whatever speech and writ-ing that comes after or over a photograph or a performance should dealwith this epistemological and methodological problem: how to listen to(and touch, taste, and smell) a photograph, or a performance, how toattune oneself to a moan or shout that animates the photograph with anintentionality of the outside. Barthes is interested in, but, by implication,does not love the world. The shout that structures and ruptures the pho-tograph of Emmett Till with a piercing historicality, that resingularizes


and reconstructs his broken body, emerges from love, from a love ofthe world, from a speciWc political intention. When Barthes invokesMs. Bradley in a critique of the naturalistic and universalizing pho-tography of the bare fact of death but fails to recognize her own meta-photographic contribution to that critique, he reveals a quite speciWcinability that will be fully activated years later in another discourse onphotography that is equally dependent on black images.

Of course, Emmett Till’s death (which word wrongs him and her) wasnot natural and the photograph shows this. It shows this and the death’sdifWculty, the suffering of the mother, the threat of a high mortalityrate and the seemingly absolute closure of his future. But it does so notby way of an erasure of lyricism or even of “the natural,” for thesereemerge, by way of an unbearable and vicious dialectic, in the photo-graph’s music. Barthes’s question was only rhetorical, though. He didn’treally ask Ms. Bradley what she thought. She told us anyway. And so thisphotograph—or, more precisely, the natural and unnatural fact that isphotographed and displayed—cannot simply be used as an inarticulatedenial of an always and necessarily false universality. Because it is in thename, too, of a dynamic universality (which critically moves in, amongother things, grief, anger, hatred, the desire to expose and eradicate sav-agery) whose organization would suspend the condition of possibilityof deaths like Emmett Till’s, that the photo was shown, is seen. It is inthe interest of a certain defeat or at least deconstruction of death, aresurrective or (second) reconstructive improvisation through death’spride and through a culture that, as Baraka points out in a recent poem,“believe[s] everything is better/Dead. And that everything alive/is [its]enemy[,]” that Till’s body was shown, was seen and that the photographof Till’s body is shown, is seen. But Barthes wasn’t trying to hear thesound of that display, the sound of the photograph’s illumination of fac-ticity that holds an afWrmation not of, but out of death. Black Art, whichis to say Black Life, which is to say Black (Life Against) Death, whichis to say Black Eros, is the ongoing production of a performance, theongoing production of a performance: rupture and collision, augmented


toward singularity, motherless child, childless mother, heartrendingshriek, levee camp moan, grieving lean and head turn, fall, Stabat mater,turn a step, loose booty funk brush stroke down my cheek, yellow dog,blue train, black drive. The ways black mo’nin’ improvises through theopposition of mourning and melancholia, disrupts the temporal frame-work that buttresses that opposition such that an extended, lingeringlook at—aesthetic response to—the photograph manifests itself as polit-ical action. Is the display of the picture melancholic? No, but it’s cer-tainly no simple release or mourning either. Mo’nin’ improvises throughthat difference. You have to keep looking at this so you can listen to it.

So in the name of this bright section of winds, some variationson Alexander’s question: Can you look at this, which is to say, canyou look at this again (such repetition being a constitutive element ofwhat it means and is to be BLACK)? Can you be BLACK and not lookat this (again)? Can you look at this (again) and be BLACK? There isa responsibility to look every time, again, but sometimes it looks likethat looking comes before, holds, replicates, reproduces what is lookedat. Nevertheless, looking keeps open the possibility of closing preciselywhat it is that prompts and makes necessary that opening. But such anopening is only held in looking that is attentive to the sound—andmovement, feel, taste, smell (as well as sight): the sensual ensemble—ofwhat is looked at. The sound works and moves not just through butbefore another movement, a movement that is before even that afWrma-tion that Barthes didn’t hear. A photograph was seen, was shown, in acomplex path, a dissonant and polyphonic drive. In the death of EmmettTill, insurrection and resurrection are each insistently before the otherwaiting for a beginning that is only possible after the experience ofall of what is held in the photograph. What is held in a photograph isnot exclusive to the photograph, but this photograph moves and works,is shown, was seen, shone, says, is animated, resounds, broken, break-ing song of, song for, something before, like The Music that is, asMingus says, not just beautiful, but terribly beautiful.

So here is the performance I discovered by way of this “legacy oflynchings”: At my Aunt Mary’s funeral (she was my favorite aunt but I


was scared to look at her face in the photograph I couldn’t help but lookat that they made of her at the funeral home), Ms. Rosie Lee Seals roseup in church, out from the program, and said, “Sister Mary Payne toldme that if she died she wanted me to give a deep moan at her funeral.”And, at that moment, in her Las Vegas-from-Louisiana accent, con-dition of impossibility of a universal language, condition of possibilityof a universal language, burying my auntie with music at morningtime, where moaning renders mourning wordless (the augmentationand reduction of or to our to oa releasing more than what is bound upin the presence of the word) and voice is dissonanced and multiplied bymetavoice, Sister Rosie Lee Seals mo’ned. New word, new world.62

Tonality of Totality

Three Material Lectures. Three Maternal Lectures.63

Step to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a dissidentgroup of autoworkers formed in Detroit in the late 1960s, and throughthe Wlm the League produced, Finally Got the News.64 Approach theWlm, and the speciWc aesthetic and theoretical interventions the Leaguemakes in the Wlm, by thinking the inscriptive force of the lecture asa form. Move after the phonography of a kind of performance—thewriting of the lecture, the reading of speech—the marked and markingmateriality of an event. The tradition from which the League and itsWlm emerges is one that requires a (speciWcally phonic) remateriali-zation, one driven by a mode of kinship that could be said to be bothwounded and irrational, that provides the open foundation for theproduction of black political sound, in particular, and black politicalsensuality, in general.

Say something whose phonic substance will be impossible toreduce, whose cuts and augmentations have to be recorded. Speak andbreak speech like a madrig, like a matrix (material, maternal). Readaloud about the out, loud reading of a set of inscriptions, inscriptionsof and against cruelty and terror, amputation and administration, thedisciplinary subordination to the instruments of production. Operateon and not simply in Marxist tracks. Cut those tracks with the force of


that phonic materiality and impossible maternity that they relinquish,perhaps necessarily, almost at their scientiWc outset in the analytic ofthe commodity. In her Critique of Postcolonial Reason Spivak moves to re-discover that force that is, for her, manifest in the “perspective of the‘native informant’ [that, she suggests,] has been foreclosed in the tradi-tion of Marxism and continues to be excluded”:65

The commodity-form is the locus of the sustained homeopathic monitor-

ing of the chronic difference between socialism and capitalism—because,

with things, it generates “more” (Mehrwert = surplus-value), and with

people, it permits abstraction and thus separation from individual inten-

tion. . . . Let us unWx the binary opposition between “labor-power [as] only

a commodity” and the heterogeneous hierarchies of race-gender-migrancy

. . . and see a shuttle where the rational calculus of commodiWcation pro-

tects from the dangers of a merely fragmented identity politics—and

not in the economic sphere alone. [Étienne] Balibar describes “the term

‘proletariat’ [as] only connot[ing] the ‘transitional’ nature of the working

class, . . . accentuat[ing] the difWculty in holding together, without aporia

or contradiction, historical materialism and the critical theory of Capi-

tal .” . . . Balibar sees this transitionality as an inability “to formulate the

concept of proletarian ideology as the ideology of proletarians.” . . . We must

read it as the moment where the Marxian text transgresses its own pro-

tocols—so far Balibar is our guide—so that it can be turned around and let

the subaltern (who is not coterminous with the proletarian) enter in the

colonial phase, and today make room for the globe-girdling nationalist-

under-erasure Southern (rather than only the Eurocentric migrant) sub-

ject who would dislocate Economic Citizenship by constant interruption,

“permanent parabasis.”66

Such rediscovery resides in (the call for) what is made possible by theMarxian text’s cutting and augmentation of itself, though this internaldisruption is always activated by a cry from outside, a cry that textcan only Wgure subjunctively. Spivak’s call is itself a recording of thatcry—a subaltern sound, a lecture written through and past and in some


impossible speech. The de Manian imperative of “permanent parabasis”animates her text as well, as anima, an animality that moves with theinterruptive-connective force of polyrhythmic organization. It’s a disci-plinary rhythm, a rhythm of the line, but that discipline responds tosomething that was there before it, something located where disruptionand creation meet as irregularity, the condition of im/possibility of thestandard. When Spivak writes in this book of the book she cannot write,she moves toward a difWculty less absolute and more particular: “If Iwere writing this section today, I would smell out here a foreclosure ofthe woman who will be the agent of Marxism today in the inevitabledocketing of European as ‘international’ and organized internationalityas ‘men’s.’”67 Her nonstandard phonography is meant to forestall suchdisclosure and such docketing. These lectures are the ampliWcation ofwhat is before such foreclosure in the text of Marx. There’s somethingthere, parallel to the perspective Spivak seeks to valorize, that theselectures bring. They bring it by way of the unWxing of a binary opposi-tion that even Spivak leaves alone: the opposition between things andpeople. Indeed, thinking labor-power as a commodity requires brush-ing against, if not necessarily fully confronting, the trace of a break-down between the person and the thing that is, on the one hand, beforethe absolute differentiation of these terms each from the other, and onthe other hand, reestablished always and everywhere in the fact of slav-ery. These lectures are recordings of the sound of that which MarxWgures, in the discourse on the fetish-character of the commodity andits secret, as impossible: the speech of the commodity. If the commod-ity could speak it would say that its value is not inherent; it would say,ultimately, that it cannot speak. But commodities speak and scream,opening tonal and grammatical Wssures that mark the space of the veryglobe-girdling, nationalist-under-erasure political agency and theoreti-cal intervention (this is to say that ideology of the proletarian that isnot one) (that is at least touching that space) for which and from whichSpivak calls. The League and the audiovisual lectures that move throughit work that way too. These lectures are delivered by the trace of thecommodity.


The trace of the commodity is inseparable from its fetish-character.Spivak says, “In [Marx’s] mature theoretical texts, he is not centrallyconcerned with ideology but rather with the positive task of acquiringthe rational x-ray vision that would cut through the fetish-character ofthe commodity.”68 So challenge such seeing or cutting through, suchviolently imposed transparency, while at the same time thinking theimmeasurable value of the fetish-character of the commodity as lens,as condition of possibility of another vision, another rationality, evenanother enlightenment. Spivak continues, by way of a telling momentin Marx:

The worker would understand and set to work the circuit of commodity

capital. Consider the role of rendering transparent assigned to rational-

ity in the following passage [from volume 2 of Capital ]: “The commodity

capital, as the direct product of the capitalist production process, recalls

its origin and is therefore more rational in its form, less lacking in con-

ceptual differentiation, than the money capital, in which every trace of

this process has been effaced. . . . The expression M . . . M (M = m)

is irrational, in that, within it, part of a sum of money appears as the

mother of another part of the same sum of money. But here this irra-

tionality disappears.69

It’s a strange passage to consider and a difWcult one. The commodity ismore rational, according to Marx, in that it recalls its origins and is,seemingly, less lacking in conceptual differentiation. This relativelygreater rationality is aligned with a certain transparency; we are ableto see through the commodity to its origins. And this seeing throughto origins is set over against the opaque—even delusional—maternalappearance of money, when one part of money seems to have given birthto another part of the same sum. When Marx aligns what we will cometo think as Wnance capital with the irrational kinship of a merely appar-ent maternity, we are called upon to think, along with him, of someoriginary authenticity that is outside or before maternity. The anti-maternal, ante-maternal commodity would emerge from an origin that


reduces difference. The reduction of difference and the reduction of thematernal coincide with a certain reduction of the material that animatesthe sciences of value from Marx’s revolutionizing of them to Saussure’sequally far-reaching application of that revolutionary move. This is tosay, of course, that the reduction of phonic substance, phonic mater-iality, that Saussure requires in order to form a universal science oflanguage is anticipated by Marx in Capital. Again, this reduction of(phonic) materiality moves along the trajectory of a reduction of (a cer-tain phonic) maternity as well. In a way that Spivak anticipatingly,echoically turns away from and toward, try to bring back all of thatnoise. The force of that return is a function of such reduction. Therichly differentiated commodity screams poetically, musically, politi-cally, theoretically; the commodity screams and sings in labor. Thespirit of the material.

None of this will have been meant to deny that the model of blacknessas black performance as black radicalism I’ve been trying to think aboutis extreme in its masculinism. Indeed, this model is marked by the on-going projection of a speciWc notion of masculinity that emerges asthe response to and repudiation and repetition of the violation of blackmaternity. This model of masculinist radicalism is so old that we can’treally locate its origin, no matter how tantalizing certain dates or events.It is, again, the radicalism of Wlial severance, the aesthetic and politicalassertion of motherless children and impossible motherhood, and it canneither be dismissed nor denied. We can see its contours in and trace itstrajectory from Douglass’s participant observation to R. Kelly’s wish.And this is to say that this black masculinist radicalism is manifest asa particular rhetorical tradition, a line of lectures, if you will, that isitself in need of the reassertion of the materiality and maternity that liesat its core. To attempt such reassertion is to be marked by a kind ofabsorption and transfer of matrical experience that is, at the very least,once removed from the intense repression of that experience that drivesthe phantasmatically uncut rhetoric of masculinist black radicalism. Inthe meantime this other materialism has to be read and it must occur at


and as a matrix of voices, dubbed or overdubbed like a palimpsest. It’sin the way one reads a lecture that theoretical interventions about, say,value, or postmodern global space reside. This is to say that they residein the lecture’s internal space and organization and in the internal spaceand organization of the lecture’s medium.

The interinanimation of the maternal and the material that isiconically manifest in the female voice, particularly in the way that thescream or cry of the female voice is irreducible to meaning, is part ofwhat I’m interested in here. This is, of course, terrain that Kaja Silver-man has famously and rigorously explored, but I have to think aboutit differently than she because I have a different sense of the value ofsounds that are irreducible to meaning. That value is bound up with thereconstruction of value and of the sciences of value. This different senseof the scream’s value stems from a tradition whose massive aesthetic,and political resources emerge precisely through, if not from, suchscreams where those screams are always so much more than primal. Thecondition of possibility of such emergence is the ability critically tothink the scream, to offer what the scream demands that is before—which is to say both prior to and past—both interpretation and reading.Following Silverman, but a little bit off her track, I want to suggestthat a quite speciWc asynchronicity between sound and image marksthe spot of a radical intervention. This off-set or off-rhythm animatesthe audiovisuality (the arrhythmia of its multiple tracks) of the com-modity, in general. In this tradition, in spite of whatever powerful voicesof disavowal, the man’s voice is a woman’s voice and the high-pitchedtruth of the falsetto is revolutionary tone and content.

Two encounters seem to occur but don’t, I think, in Fredric Jameson’sessay “Cognitive Mapping”: the encounter with the aesthetic (and, byextension, between the aesthetic and the political) and the encounterbetween Jameson’s theoretical resources and aspirations and those ofthe League. These are resources and aspirations having to do with pos-sible understandings, both prescriptive and descriptive, of the aestheticand of representation, categories Jameson privileges in his essay. These


resources and aspirations are thoroughly and richly documented in theLeague’s journalism and are manifest in the aesthetic, organizationalworks and forms they created, especially in Finally Got the News. In“Cognitive Mapping” Jameson mentions the Wlm—even calls it a “Wneand exciting” one—only in order to dismiss it as the very icon of theLeague’s ultimate “failure” and of the reasons for that “failure” and asa kind of slippage, by way of the ineluctable contradiction embedded inthe opposition of the global and the local (what Jameson calls “spatialdiscontinuity” or “the inability to map socially”), into mere “spectacle,”the imaged disappearance of its referent, the League and its movement.More to the point, Jameson sees the Wlm and the League as an exampleof failed representation that can then be framed within a more “suc-cessful spatial representation”—a “narrative of defeat which sometimes,even more effectively, causes the whole architectonic of postmodernglobal space to rise up in ghostly proWle behind itself as if some ultimatedialectical barrier or limit.” Such a narrative is where the terms andconditions of such failure are most clearly shown. And so he engages notwith the League and with its mediated self-representations but ratherwith the indisputably valuable volume on the League, Detroit, I Do MindDying, by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin.70 The object Jamesonengages, then, is not the Wlm the League produces, not its own repre-sentation of itself, but rather the representation of the League’s failure,which is, ultimately, understood by Jameson to be a failure adequatelyto represent itself (in relation to postmodern, post-Fordist, postindus-trial global capital and global space). But if that other aesthetic, theaesthetic of cognitive mapping as Jameson understands it, is possible;if, as a matter of fact, it is given as a kind of magniWcent chance or open-ing in the very encounter between Marxist theory and the theoretical re-sources and political-economic aspirations held within (the work of ) theblack aesthetic that Jameson marks in a framing that is also an erasure;then the problem of an inability to confront those resources can’t be over-looked. Jameson’s essay provides not only the opportunity to deal withthis problem, it also provides for us the occasion to look at a model—the Wlm itself—of such an encounter, for it is at the non/intersection of


an emergent aesthetic of cognitive mapping, on the one hand, and acritical extension of the black aesthetic in its broadest historical sense,on the other, that Finally Got the News is situated.

Here is the opening of “Cognitive Mapping”:

I am addressing a subject about which I know nothing whatsoever, except

for the fact that it does not exist. The description of a new aesthetic, or

the call for it, or its prediction—these things are generally done by prac-

ticing artists whose manifestoes articulate the originality they hope for in

their own work, or by critics who think they already have before their

eyes the stirrings and emergences of the radically new. Unfortunately,

I can claim neither of these positions, and since I am not even sure how

to imagine the kind of art I want to propose here, let alone afWrm its

possibility, it may well be wondered what kind of operation this will be,

to produce the concept of something we cannot imagine.71

Jameson says that we are in need, but incapable, of those forms of repre-sentation—political and aesthetic—that would allow for both a descrip-tion of postmodern global space and a prescriptive vision of thatspace transformed, resocialized. And note that this spatial problematicis immediately bound to a temporal/historical problem concerning therelation between prescription, or prophecy, and description while re-membering Ellison’s formulation, from the epilogue of Invisible Man,as a particularly elegant and succinct articulation of this complex.Whether it be the restricted frames of various forms of aesthetic or evenjournalistic realisms or the violent and absurd inadequacies of represen-tative democracy and their corollary problematics of leadership, theseproblems of representation emerge with a special intensity in the age ofmultinational capital, the particular spatial form (of contradiction) thatcorresponds to it, and the temporal and historical frames within whichthat space is cognized, successfully or not.

So Jameson describes or calls for or predicts another aesthetic in theinterest of another politics. And this interest, he acknowledges, imme-diately raises the possibility that the aesthetic or theoretical attention


to the aesthetic is just “a kind of blind,”72 just a pretext for debating the-oretical and political issues that become dominant after the fact of theemergence of something called “post-Marxism.” In particular, Jamesonwants to rehabilitate the concept of social totality, without which therecan be neither a description of capital/ism nor a prescription for social-ism. To do so he would employ particular and traditional uses of theaesthetic, namely, those bound up with teaching, moving, and delight-ing. He employs Darko Suvin’s notion of the cognitive as a term thatbinds together and describes these uses, though importantly he abstractsthe key word “increment” from Suvin’s formulation, thereby losing thepotential force of a possible disruptively augmentative kind of energythat could be held within and be itself disruptive of Suvin’s additivenotion of aesthetic cognition. I want to get back to this—the weight ofa kind of augmentative or invaginative musicality and the aesthetic—abit later. But now it’s important to point out that Jameson’s recovery ofthese uses of the aesthetic are bound up with a necessary attempt torehabilitate the notion of representation, a notion that he equates withWguration as such and not with, as I indicated earlier, restrictive notionsof more or less impossible forms of verisimilitude. The call for a newaesthetic is the call for a new mode of representation. And what is to berepresented or Wgured is social totality, itself neither characterized bynor iconic of anything other than capital itself.

Jameson goes on to trace his particular periodization of capital.He charts the correspondence between its three stages—market, impe-rialist, multinational—and their particular spatial forms—the Cartesiangrid of inWnite extension and an equally inWnite imagined ability topicture or model the entirety of the grid and the relations situatedwithin it; the unencompassable world space of imperialism in which theappearance of the local only marks the absence of a distant, space-timeseparated “essence”; the spatio-temporal compression of that modernist /imperialist space-time separated distance, a compression characterizedby the massive accelerations, foreshortenings and foreshadowings madepossible by cybernetics and manifest in what amounts to a debilitatingand overwhelming immediacy wherein subjects, themselves fragmented


by the force of this compression, are thrust into a set of multiple reali-ties where this double fragmentation exceeds even the aesthetic appara-tus of a modernism that had learned how at least partially to reconstructsome ruins. It is at this point that Jameson gives his account of the bookabout—rather than the Wlm about and by—the League of Revolution-ary Black Workers, hipping his audience to the fact that he thinks we’reall “sophisticated” enough to be able to theorize the aesthetic, to thinkthe concept of what we cannot imagine, via Georgakis’s and Surkin’swork of nonWction. This sophistication allows the League and the Wlmthey produced to be relegated to the status of an example that is, in itself,essentially unworthy of any attention but is important in that it allowscertain other phenomena, more general phenomena, totality or at leastthe need for and absence of its conceptualization, to show up. Only inthis limited but enabling way, by precisely having nothing whatever tosay about totality, does the League have anything to do with any possi-ble understanding of totality.

But in a crucial moment in the Wlm, League spokesman KennethCockrel’s lectural voice emerges and holds forth precisely on totality,on the nature of the world order and the League’s position within it.His voice emerges from an off-screen source in and as that mode ofbeing that Michel Chion, in The Voice in Cinema, calls the acousmêtre.The lecture’s content marks it as of the worker though the images onscreen are now of the bodies of administration and the milieu of circu-lation and consumption of the automobiles that the workers make. Thefact that Cockrel is a lawyer completes the chain of known and unknowndiscrepancies that structure the Wlm and our experience of it. If we thinkthese discrepancies as disruptions of audiovisual, ideological, and theo-retical synchronies, then the question of a reading of the Wlm mightbe said to enter terrain laid out by Chion and by Kaja Silverman’s cri-tique of Chion in The Acoustic Mirror.73 An improvisation of the lecturedemands other protocols that bear a trace of Silverman and Chionacquired in the movement through the space between them.

So I want to begin to tie a preliminary investigation into the pos-sibility of a Marxian analytic of acousmatrical sound (or, more precisely,


of the musical non/conjuncture of the aural and the visual) in Wlm to areading of Jameson’s description/call /prediction (the ambivalence withwhich he names his project is important) of and for an “aesthetics ofcognitive mapping.” Jameson’s otherwise forceful argument for thenecessity of totalizing thinking to not only the accurate description andrepresentation of “postmodern global space” but also to the vision ofthat space reborn is undermined precisely by an unaugmented appeal towhat elsewhere he calls “Wgures of the visible.” Chion makes us awareof the uncomfortable proximity of the acousmêtre to “the paranoid andoften obsessional panoptic fantasy, which is the total mastery of spaceby vision” that is given in the very fantasy of the maternal voice thatSilverman catches him reproducing.74 This constellation is, of course,disturbingly close to the very imaginative faculty Jameson desires. Buttone and sound in Finally Got the News transform representation into asynaesthetic substitute for vision—wherein a narrative of defeat turnsinto a projection of victory—which is borne in the Wlm as a kind ofpotential energy and is the trace of the particular and powerful force ofaurality in the Afro-diasporic political and aesthetic tradition that theWlm, and the movement it portrays, extends. The irruption of sound intoJameson’s argument for the necessity of a picture of the social ensemblefor any utopian sense of how the world should be, makes an under-standing of that ensemble possible precisely by way of a disruptive aug-mentation of the very idea of a purely visual picture. Meanwhile theoperations of certain sonic elements in Finally Got the News move withinthe project of representing and transforming postmodern global spacewhile keeping in mind the fact that such operations—part of the his-torical tendency of the aesthetic to reconstruct the sensual/cognitiveensemble—are partial and preliminary. The acousmêtre is revolutionaryhere precisely in that it is not all-seeing, thereby going against the grainof Chion’s analytical description. Ultimately, the irruption of soundinto Jameson’s picture, which reorganizes Wlmic space (the space ofand between various registers of Wlm’s sensual ensemble), reconWguresthe aesthetic as a mode of inhabiting and improvising that space thaticonically represents a corollary mode of inhabiting and improvising


social/global space. So that the justness of Jameson’s claims regardingthe necessity of a sense of the utopian and the necessary link of such asense to a representation of the social ensemble depends upon the con-nection between such representation and the ensemble of the senses.

Sound, not speech (meaning); sound in speech: a teaching tone, atone calibrated to one of what Jameson calls “the traditional formula-tions of the uses of the work of art” that will still be operative for thisnew aesthetics of cognitive mapping. The lecture moves in joint direc-tions: toward something that will have been described at the conver-gence of a generative phonology of the language of totality/utopia anda Marxian analytic of accent. This is about what sound and tone do tocounteract the “perceptual barrage of immediacy”; how to be both inand outside the city (both one and many). These are things all boundup with what sound can open up for you here. So the narrative of defeatas condition of possibility of victory is all bound up with a corrective tothe ocularcentric discourse of image and spectacle that is fundamentalto Jameson’s analytic of postmodern space and to the understandingof that space that he derives from Wlm when Wlm’s aurality, its phonicsubstance, is forgotten. What can sound do to overcome spatial discon-tinuities? (This is not but nothing other than an attempt at a slightvariation on and injection of rigor into a set of clichés about musicas universal, which is to say totalizing/utopianizing, language). It’s allabout the crucial importance of sound to Finally Got the News thatremains nameless in its spare mention in Jameson’s piece though eventhe sound the nameless object bears comes back in the name of theobject substituted for it, since the book’s title comes from a blues—a localand inverted variation on an old Delta theme—that at one point ani-mates the Wlm. And the Wlm’s title comes from a slogan, from the toneof a voice (how this tone breaks voice as well as gaze is for another time):“Wnally got the news on how are [union] dues are being used.” It is leftto us to think these relations: prescription/organization, description/representation, in order to investigate the emphasis placed on descrip-tion and representation in Jameson’s project. When prescription comesup it comes out as vision. How can we make that sound? This is about


the importance, which is to say the politics, of how you sound. This isall about an analytic/organization of ensemble: the ensemble of thesocial and of the senses. The cognitive increment is given only in theencounter, in the space-time of the encounter that is between encoun-tering. In such space-time (separation), in such a cut, lies certain chances.The encounter is in the cut that tone instantiates and rhythm holds. Ifwe linger in that cut, that music, that spatio-temporal organization, wemight commit an action. Finally Got the News predicts, describes callsfor such a cut. If the Wlm is image and spectacle it is also sound andmusic. This means that it is not merely, ultimately, “an example thatmay serve to illustrate.” It is also the counter-example (counter even tothe very logic of exemplarity) that serves to sing where the musicalityof Wlm form is the material imaging of victory.

This is all to say that something that will have been encounteredas a product of a black aesthetic ongoingly stages the piercing insistenceof the excluded. Such insistence is not only of excluded identity butalso of excluded sense. And this is not only in the interest of a dissidentparticularity but in the interest of ensembles that are manifest in suchparticularity: the ensembles of the senses, of labor, of human identity.Such an encounter would have indexed a kind of parallel—betweensound in the sensual space of Wlm and blackness in the political spaceof labor and of postmodern global economic space more generally. Andthis conXation of blackness and sound will have already been cut andaugmented—invaginated (to index a chain of analysis and suggestionthat moves from Silverman to Spivak to Derrida and beyond)—by asexual economy Silverman diagnoses and disavows. It is at this point,where nonconvergent audiovisuality instantiates the interarticulationof race as phantasmic sexuality and sex as phantasmic raciality (to useand abuse a phrase of Balibar’s), that the black radical tradition and theaesthetics of cognitive mapping emerge in and as a kind of encounter.See, what the League did is important because of what their doingopened, which was precisely the possibility of that universality and/ortotality, which some might say they suspended in practice and in theory.This opening works precisely in the sound/tone of their descriptions of


totality, in their eloquent vulgarity (which is to be read doubly: doctri-naire and vernacular) and musicality. The point is that what is held inthe description is the clue—namely, the sound—of a prescription materi-ally embodied in the sensual space of the Wlm itself. Cockrel seemsto have a pretty good grasp of the problematics of postmodern globalspace. It is conveyed to us in what Georgakas and Surkin would latercall a “high-pitched voice,” a voice pitched high and over against a visualmontage that turns from assembly line to management ofWce. And it’snot that the content that he screams is a misrepresentation; it’s justthat it’s better to be hip also to the form through which that content isconveyed because it gives an opening to a more glorious content, the“foreshadowing description” of how the world would be that cuts andaugments the form of the description of how fucked up the world wasthen and is now. This cut and augmented form and content is a functionof the radical force of the fantasy of the maternal voice in black politicsand black art. Here are two such fantasies, musical lectures driven byan impossibility (and I should mention Spillers here again as she is themost invaluable analyst of this impossibility—this broken, wounded, irra-tional, doubly invaginated, invaginative maternity that is multiply one,that is not one, that is more than one, that is of the whole that is mul-tiply and is not and is more than one) that is at once psychic, political,economic, legal, and geographic.

We’ve seen that Mackey understands the falsetto to be the strained,maternal, and material residue of “a legacy of lynchings” that illumi-nates and ampliWes that legacy’s ongoing sexual cut of sexual difference.Cockrell and Marvin Gaye, in the dissonance of dissidence and seduc-tion, converge at this apocalyptic break, the falsetto setting the condi-tions and need of another cryptonomy, one that might acknowledge andamplify the out harmonics of maternal fantasy that drive such lecturalphonography.

Therefore, this is about the erotics of Marvin Gaye, mechanical(re)production and the space-time of black vocal performance. It worksfrom two initial premises: (1) Marvin Gaye’s phrasing reveals something


to us about the erotics of time; (2) Marvin Gaye’s erotics are always alsoa politics. These premises require a space internal to the performancethat is given only electronically, only in the recording, only in the per-formance that is recording, the engineering of musical reproduction.This building of musical space is accomplished with overdubbing, witha certain contrapuntality of soul that Gaye pioneers and perfects in his1971 masterpiece What’s Going On.75 This creation of internal musicalspace is paralleled by the sense of a new and other cognitive mapping,a whole other thing emerging from Detroit that Berry Gordy had tobe brought kicking and screaming into, on the one hand, but that hadalready been at the bottom—as the bottom but also high and windingabove and through—of the Sound of Young America. This political aes-thetic was never separate from Gaye’s massive and ongoing commitmentto and immersion in the erotic. The same technical innovations used tooffer up new prescriptive and descriptive social visions are deployed inthe no less important work of seduction. Gaye’s masterpiece “Since IHad You”76 exempliWes this, disturbing or disrupting the lectured nar-rative of love abandoned and retrieved with the ecstatics of unadorned,irreducible and highly aestheticized phonic substance, the eruption ofwhat Austin would have called the “merely phonetic,” itself alwayscarrying the trace of what Althusser would have called the “merely ges-tural,” cut and augmented always by the Xavor of what Adorno mighthave dismissed as the “merely culinary.” The recording is the only pos-sible site of this refusal to reduce the phonic substance and this reorder-ing of aesthetic space. It marks and makes possible that resistance of theobject—to dis/appearance or interpretation—that constitutes the essenceof performance. In the production of the recording, Gaye producesthat new space whose essence is the ongoing call for the production ofNew Space, of a new world, by holding—which is to say suspending,embracing—time.

My initial interest, therefore, is rhythmic, though the harmoniccomplexities of a technically facilitated counterpoint—in the very pres-sure that it puts on rhythm—is also at issue here. I want to show howthe imposition of certain speciWc and repressive temporal regimes of


labor—which Adorno characterized as “the rhythm of the iron system”—are both echoed and disrupted in “Since I Had You.” This double move-ment enacts not only that labor of negation that Adorno argued wasbeyond the reach of popular music in general and black popular musicin particular, but moves beyond such enactment and toward somethinglike the afWrmative musical imaging of unprecedented space and un-anticipated time, something like what José Gil + Samuel R. Delanymight call a theoretical image of the city. This afWrmation is, how-ever, not to be reduced to that afWrmative movement or action of cul-ture that Marcuse describes as the hallmark of appropriative aesthetics.This reduction is resisted in spite of the best efforts of producers, recordcompany executives, music journalists, and so on, who move ever morequickly toward the domestication of radical sound, and it is this resis-tance that demands analysis.

In Rethinking Working Class History, Dipesh Chakrabarty, afterMarx, reminds us that “the everyday functioning of the capitalist fac-tory . . . produced documents, hence knowledge, about working-classconditions.”77 This knowledge is an effect of disciplinary surveillance.But there is also that disciplinary modality that is embedded in thetechnical subordination of worker to machine. Here one must raise thequestion concerning the knowledge of—which is the ground of thattechnical subordination to—the instruments of labor as well as thatknowledge that is essential to the disciplining (and standardization ofthe products) of the worker. The Marxian tradition that Chakrabartyextends teaches that such knowledge is also the condition of possibilityof a revolutionary consciousness that threatens surveillance, the domina-tion of the machine and the uniformity of the product. This knowledgeis both a condition and a condition of possibility of another knowledge;it is the product and producer of other documents. In the case of muchof the popular music of Detroit, this other knowledge of the worker isthe knowledge of freedom itself encoded in a particular knowledge ofmusic, a preWgurative inscription counter to industrial-phonographicpower. This isn’t just about what Baraka called “the changing same,”though it is bound to that; nor is this another variation on the thematics


of the hidden transcript, especially since organization and technicalknowledge are unquestioned here. This is about a certain adisciplinarycounter-inscription before the fact, if you will, of discipline; this is acounter-inscription that is situated precisely in the gap Marx locatesbetween “(the knowledge of ) human nature and its life-situation,”though that knowledge or gap is located in sites Marx didn’t fully antic-ipate and Adorno couldn’t Wnd. This is to say that it is not only locatedafter the point or moment of a postemancipatory, postmigratory emer-gence into wage-labor, in which a speciWc form of alienation associatedwith such labor is manifest; it’s before that. And so the document ormusic, similarly, is not just the hidden transcript of repressed knowledgeof alienation but is the reservoir of a certain knowledge of freedom, acounter-inscription anticipatory of the power/discipline that it over-writes and the life-situation against which it prescribes, out from theoutside of the regime of signs we now inhabit. This is the knowledgeof freedom that is not only before wage-labor but before slavery as well,though the forms it takes are possible only by way of the crucible of theexperience of slavery (as forced and stolen labor and sexuality, as woundedkinship and imposed exile). Gaye ought to be situated in an ongoingthematic investigation of the relation between the production of knowl-edge and the production of economic and aesthetic value, between pro-duction in the factory and production in the studio. “Since I Had You”is indelibly marked with this soundwriting against standardization byway of the most intimate knowledge of worker discipline, a knowledgethat is, as it were, cut into the groove of the record just as surely as thegroove cuts against the very grain of the uniformity of the line.

This is also not just about the circulation of social energy; thisis about its conservation. And not just as matter or materiality (not justthe mechanics of a certain process that is both social and physical), butas reserve. It demands thinking the form, content, and matter of thesong as reservoir holding the theoretical image of the city beyond codeand/or encoding. In Detroit, there is resistance of and to the object.The loss of a hand, for instance, bridges the gap between whipping andWnes as modes of inscription, disciplinary texts. This is what the League


fought in a certain rewriting of sound against the line—an echoed or,more precisely, overtonal disruption of the assembly line and the dangersof its oppressive demands by the bass line. In Gaye’s work after What’sGoing On, the contrapuntal is constructed not only by way of suchpolyrhythmic and extraharmonic intervention (a kind of irregularity ornonstandardization of pulse-to-hummm-or-buzzzzzz to whose differen-tiating force Adorno was unattuned), but as the disruption of the dis-ciplinary hegemony of another powerful technic, namely, the rhetoricof the love song, a generic technicality that produces its own large setof problems. Here subordination to the technical apparatus of the lovesong is again cut by manipulation of, by technical in/subordination to,the recording apparatus. The lyric subject of the love song is disruptedby Gaye’s own other voices. The rhetoric of a most instrumental ratio-nality is cut by the rhetorician’s own rapture. Listen to the song andthink about how the theoretical image of the city might be held in andmight emerge from the interconnection of the knowledge/discipline oflabor and sexuality that this particular aesthetic space-time contains.

Marvin Gaye hips us to the erotics of time. Marvin Gaye’s eroticsare always also a politics. The call to sing that is song, that wholeso-called postmodern, metaWctional, improvisational arrangement, theinternalization of call and response in the form of a deconstruction andreconstruction of the song and of the song form itself: this is an integralpart of 1960s black popular music but goes all the way back to the com-plex and unavailable origins of black performance. Again, something likethis self-reXexive reanarrangement is often cited as a hallmark of so-called postmodern art, though its often more subtle and sophisticatedparallel or antecedent is never thought within the context of investiga-tions of postmodernism; and, Wnally, with good reason, or with reasonin addition to the bad reasons of racist and exclusionary canon forma-tion. For in Marvin Gaye, in the midst of a certain sounding of despairand desire, there is a renewal that is never tantamount to the kind ofincredulity toward narratives of transcendence that is said by some tocharacterize canonical postmodernism, to accompany the Wction’s ironicself-reXexiveness or self-destruktive inward turns. Rather, in Gaye we get


a vicious critique, but never an abandonment, of these narratives andtheir destinations—freedom and, more to the point for “Since I HadYou,” pleasure. Thus the intersection of rhythms and the allegories theycarry; thus the doubleness of Gaye iconized in the rhythmic arrest thatis not an arrest. The cut he enacts is given as a juxtapositional drive fromfast to slow, from joy to tragedy, from soul to gospel, from the devil tothe Lord, from writing to improvisation: all of what is held in phrasing,particularly in that moment of suspension when he implores, “Don’tmake me wait!”

This expression of desire is where the aesthetics of cognitive map-ping that Jameson imagines but can’t describe is located. Remember,Jameson’s desire for that aesthetic is prompted by a couple of so-calledfailures localized in Detroit. One is the supposed “failure” of the Leagueof Revolutionary Black Workers to adequately position itself in thespace of postmodern global capital. The other is what Kevin Lynchdescribes as a “failure” of arrangement and rearrangement of the Detroitspace that leads to a general inability to form a cognitive map of the city.The thing is, all along such mapping and imaging is embedded in themusic of the city, written in the rhythm of the beat and the technicalmixing and remixing of voices. This writing or knowledge is distilled ina phrase that acts, more than anything, like a kind of landmark, a sus-pension of or after the bridge, the bridge of deferred—if not lost—mat-ter and desire, the carving out of a new square or sphere. Another wayto put it, way after Raymond Williams, is that this phrase gives one thefeeling of a reconstruction. You move through a soundscape you getmoved by and enter another scene.

This has been the mutation of a memory, a memory of a revolutionarytone recently muted in black discourse, a muting all bound up withrelinquishing the promise of communism (or, perhaps better, the com-mons; and I’ll say what I mean by this in more detail later—for now I’lljust say that I mean the radical, invaginative universalization or proletar-ianization of the ensemble of the senses and the ensemble of the social)(or: the socialization of the ensemble of the senses, the sensualization of


the ensemble of the social) in black politics and aesthetics. I wanted toamplify the memory of a politics of sound that I fell in love with or thatone falls in love, or something kinda like love, to.

When I Wrst heard Angela Davis’s voice I got the news. Again,you might call it something about a revolutionary tone recently de-ampliWed—along with a certain revolutionary rhetoric—in black polit-ical discourse. Not that preacherly thing that persists, like a degradedaural shadow of King, like Wynton to Clifford or Miles, ultimatelybearing nothing as much as the weaknesses of the clown show; rathersomething I Wrst heard a long time ago in Angela Davis’s voice, a hang-ing or lingering or dying fall of or at the end of consonants, open to butoutside of a certain kind of chant and for a certain kind of afWrmation,precisely + more that one Jameson prescriptively elegizes in “CognitiveMapping,” an afWrmation of the sound of resistance in a narrative ofdefeat where sound and tone function as elements necessary to any (ana-lytic of “successful”) spatial representation. Such representation wouldbe erotic, sensual, of a certain notion of ensemble, and these lectures areabout the tonality of totality, the revolutionary tone and how it carriesforth precisely that which Jameson says is lost. The ensemble cuts har-mony; and “the rhythm of the iron system” is broken as the beat goeson by the tone of the DRUM.

Davis has rigorously seen through the fetishistic commodiWcationof her own photographic image and would, I’m sure, have a stringentcritique of the way I am fetishizing her voice.78 At the same time, evenas I cringe myself at my own fetishizing impulse, I would echo Spivak’scall for a move beyond what she terms, by way of Balibar, “commoditypietism.”79 These lectures move always in the interest of those politi-cal uses of the erotic that exceed the lyric and readings of the lyric,even Davis’s reading of the work of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and BillieHoliday.80 Davis’s critique of commodiWcation and the atrophy of polit-ical memory it induces is focused on the Wgure and ground of arrest, ofher own image in an arrest perpetrated by the police and reproduced inand circulated as the photograph. Davis reads her own commodiWed,replicated image as an embodied soullessness, Wxed, artifactualized, in a


way that erases “the activist involvement of vast numbers of black womenin movements that are now represented with even greater masculinistcontours than they actually exhibited at the time.”81 After the sexualpolitics of movement(s) and of the movement(s) are examined in theirprocessual actuality and in their fetishized arrest, Davis calls for a polit-ical animation of what has been arrested, a reanimation even of thephotograph, and focuses on the shadowed women of past movements.Davis contests representations of the phallocentrism of (the) move-ment(s) of black arts and black power and her work is crucial preciselybecause she implies that that phallocentrism, while productive of realsocial facts, was invaginated all along, thereby instantiating the cuttotality of movement(s) in such a way as to provide a clue for a histori-cally grounded reanimation of black politics beyond anti-essentialistand anti-totalizing skepticisms. The necessary critique of the uses andabuses of fetishization and the romanticization and disavowal of mater-nity animates Davis’s work as fully as it does that of Silverman. Butsometimes that critique seems to mute the very sound that animates it,which is the sound of a lecture.

These lectures are the mutation of the memory of attending a lectureby Angela Davis in 1973 when I was ten, a lecture that my mother tookme to, and of having everything seem to stop, or at least slow downenough for someone to begin moving by way of that insistently previ-ous and unlocatable maternal and material motif of black radicalism.The opening to the new city and the new world is this: the crypt wherehis falsetto (interruptive-connective bridge of lost and found desire, lostand found matter) and her dying fall (the sounding, musical descentwhere action is made possible) glance and brush. Dance.


What if the beholder glances, glances away, driven by aversion as muchas desire? This is to ask not only, what if beholding were glancing; it isalso—or maybe even rather—to ask, what if glancing is the aversion ofthe gaze, a physical act of repression, the active forgetting of an objectwhose resistance is now not the avoidance but the extortion of the gaze?

In spite of a presence that could scarcely be called anything otherthan foundational, black artist/philosopher Adrian Piper barely shows upfor certain critics who have taken on the task of deWning and explainingmodernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde. (I’m thinking, here,of major critics like Rosalind Krauss, who once said something to theeffect that there must not be any important black artists because, if therewere, they would have brought themselves to her attention.1 For Piperthis avoidance would be cataloged alongside a host of other “ways ofaverting one’s gaze.”2 Piper’s insistence on what she calls the “indexicalpresent,” the deictic-confrontational Weld her art produces and withinwhich it is to be beheld, emerges precisely as a kind of resistance to suchaversion, an insistent bringing of herself to the in/attention of some-body like Krauss. That aversion marks the spot of both Michael Fried’sfamous theoretical dismissal of theatricality in contemporary art (in hisseminal essay “Art and Objecthood”)3 and the objection, by a host ofcritics, including—most prominently—Krauss, to that dismissal. This isto say that Fried’s aversion to this particular moment in the history of

Resistance of the Object:Adrian Piper’s Theatricality

233

artistic theatricality and his critics’ aversion of their critical attentionfrom Piper converge at the point where a quite speciWc legacy of perfor-mance as the resistance of the object becomes clear. That clarity is givenby the force of aurality in Piper’s work. To avert one’s gaze from Piperis to refuse to hear the sound in her work of that quite speciWc object-hood that joins blackness and black performance. And the critique ofFried’s dismissal of objecthood and its complex, ambivalent grounding inClement Greenberg’s in/famous assertion of the necessary optical purityof authentic modernist art is possible only by way of the exploration ofthat speciWcally black objecthood that it has been Piper’s project to inves-tigate.4 If, as Zora Neale Hurston suggests, the essence of the Negro isdrama, theatricality, then perhaps this is how that theatricality works.5

Piper’s concern with Wnding, elaborating, and enacting objectionsto the various ways of averting one’s gaze has led her to deploy a modeof theatricality or objecthood Fried had not anticipated or taken intoaccount. Piper’s methods, much to her chagrin, are anything but sure-Wre. And this doesn’t even mean that this would rehabilitate her underthe aesthetic limits laid down by Fried, who thinks that anything sure-Wre is necessarily inartistic. Piper would only repudiate Fried’s mod-ernist aesthetics in the interest of a theatricality that reconstitutes andredoubles the realm of ethics. The essential theatricality of blackness,of the commodity who materially objects beyond any subjunctivelyposited speech, is evoked in the service of metaethics. The resistance ofthe object is the condition of possibility of a metaethics whose fullestenactment is in Piper’s art, though it is informed very much by the proj-ect of a metaethics that is proper to her philosophy.

Piper traces the boundary between critical philosophy and racialperformance and thereby allows us to think the place of the latter in theformer, to dwell on what happens when racial performance is deployedin order to critique racial categories and to investigate what happenswhen the visual singularity of a performed, curated, or conceptualizedimage is deployed in order to move beyond what she calls the “visualpathology” of racist categorization.6 Piper opens such questions byway of her intense engagement with Kant, by way of her belief in the


liberatory value of an ongoing redeWnition of necessarily incompletecategories and the therapeutic, self-transformational power her per-formances are intended to exert to that end. This belief raises furtherquestions regarding the place or echo of racialized performance in theconstruction of Kant’s formulations, not only at the level of the objector example, but also at the level of the iconic theorizing subject, Kanthimself. Thinking Kant through Piper and vice versa allows us to ask:Is critical philosophy always already infected and structured by thisvisual pathology? Can we so easily separate visual singularity fromvisual pathology? Can singularity ever be singularly visual? Might itnot be necessary to hear and sound the singularity of the visage? Howdo sound and its reproduction allow and disturb the frame or boundaryof the visual? What’s the relation between phonic materiality and ano-riginal maternity? If we ask these questions we might become attunedto certain liberating operations sound performs at that intersection ofracial performance and critical philosophy that had heretofore beenthe site of the occlusion of phonic substance or the (not just Kantian)pre-critical oscillation between the rejection and embrace of certaintones. Sound gives us back the visuality that ocularcentrism had repressed.Meanwhile, there is a cumulative effect of the impure and aggressivelyde-purifying soundtrack in Piper that marks that holosensual, invagina-tively ensemblic internal differentiation of the object that the most in-Xuential art criticism of the last Wfty years has heretofore seemed unableto reach. A major aspect of Piper’s intervention is this phonic recoveryof the artwork’s visual materiality (or, as she would put it, singularity)that Fried’s (somewhat idiosyncratic) Saussureanism requires him toreduce. A phonology is missing in Fried, one that would be attuned tovisual art’s phonography.

For Piper, to be for the beholder is to be able to mess up or messwith the beholder. It is the potential of being catalytic. Beholding isalways the entrance into a scene, into the context of the other, of theobject. This is a very different experience of beholding, a very differentexperience of the beholder, than that offered by Fried. The Friedian


beholder, even in his fascination, never moves out of himself, neverachieves or is submitted to a kind of ecstasy, the transportative forceof the syncope. The beholder is never estranged, never lost or even darkto himself; rather he continually fulWlls that self in the ascription ofmeaning to the beheld and, more fundamentally, in the ascription ofgreatness or not, authentic and autonomous aestheticity or not, to theartwork. The beholder arrives at that self-possessive sense or knowledgeof self that is the essence of what Fried calls conviction. The beholderbecomes a subject again in this profoundly antitheatrical moment. Oneisn’t absorbed by the painting as in an entrance into its scene; instead,one is, in the instant of the frame, in the visual experience of Xatnessas an instantaneous moment of framing, absorbed into or by Xatnessreconceived as a mirror. The painting is a mirror. Absorption is self-absorption. Such self-absorption comes in moments of calmness, notunder the disruptive and catalytic pressure of an object even if thatobject is there for you, the disruptive and catalytic pressure of an othereven if that other is there for you. There’s something too dangerousabout this broke, brokedown, breaking energy of objection. So Fried isnot into the fact that

when you encountered minimalist work you characteristically entered an

extraordinarily charged mise-en-scène. . . . It was as though their work,

their installations, infallibly offered one a kind of “heightened” experience,

and I wanted to understand the nature of this sureWre, and therefore to

my mind essentially inartistic, effect.7

Rather, Fried, after Diderot, is concerned with “the conditions thathad to be fulWlled in order for the art of painting to successfully per-suade its audience of the truthfulness of its representations.”8 But it is,Wnally, the complex double bind of subjection that is the condition Friedand Diderot are after. The painting moves, depending upon its histori-cal moment, in and as the complexity of that possession and forfeitureof self that constitutes the establishment of the subject-in-subjection.Everything moves from, Fried writes from, the position of a subject


who, in the very fullness of a presence that could never admit its ownpsycho-political ephemerality, is not there; the (self-)absorbed beholderis an absent beholder, an absented or subjected subject, located no place:the view(er) from nowhere. This viewer from nowhere, this nowhere ofviewing, this instantaneous no time of viewing, of the viewer, is what hecalls “presentness,” as opposed to presence.9

For Fried, presence, as theater, is between (the arts, the beholder,and some passive-aggressive object) like a bridge. It is incumbent uponus, by way of Piper and the tradition she extends, to think the bridgeas translation or transportation, where matter and desire are both lostand found. Meanwhile, what Fried opposes to theatricality is signiWca-tion and what separates the artwork from the mere object is preciselythat difference that is the condition of possibility of signiWcation. Thisdifference that is internal to the artwork is what Fried calls the art-work’s syntax. For Fried, the mere object is never differential, never syn-tactic. It is neither different from the rest of the world nor from itself,and that absence of difference produces an absence of conviction in thebeholder—a quite speciWc inability to see the object as an artwork thattakes its place in the history of artworks. This absence of convictionstems from the indifferent’s necessary and ongoing production of non-meaning that will have devolved, always, into an inWnitely expandablelist of “merelys”: the culinary, the theatrical, the phonetic, the decora-tive, the tasteful, the gestural, the literal, the cultural. It’s important toremember that Fried denies the internal difference of the object even ashe valorizes the internal difference of the artwork. This is to say thathe denies the interiority of the object even as he valorizes the interior-ity of the artwork. But this internal difference of the artwork is nothingother than the mirror through which the beholder is absorbed into thedangerous maelstrom of his own internally different interiority, theplace where he is lost in the very act of Wnding himself, the place whereloss constitutes the foundation of self-possession. So that consciousnessof art is nothing other than consciousness of self. The conXation of art-consciousness and self-consciousness is something to which we’ll returnby way of Piper’s active objection to it.


Meanwhile, Fried says that the success and survival of the artsdepend upon their ability to defeat theater; that art degenerates as itapproaches the condition of theater; that the concepts of quality andvalue, central to art, exist only in the individual arts and not in theirin-between, which is theater. The material of painting and sculpture—its material constraints, supports, elements—must be confronted and,most importantly, reduced or dematerialized so that meaning can be pro-duced in and by the artwork, so that something beyond the object canbe given. Here, in a sense, Fried extends a kind of antimaterialism thatanimates the work of Saussure. If, as Derrida argues, Saussure’s quest fora universal science of language requires “the reduction of the phonicsubstance,”10 then the search for a certain convergence of meaning anduniversality that we might call, after Derrida, “the truth in painting,”requires a reduction of the visual substance. This is why Fried is criti-cal of Greenberg’s reduction of modern painting to visuality. He’s mov-ing under the aegis of a much more fundamental reduction, a reductionof, not to, visuality.

What Fried is after is fullness and inexhaustibility, but not theinexhaustibility of the bare object. This latter inexhaustibility is a func-tion of the object’s emptiness or hollowness and it produces the experi-ence of the literalist, minimalist, or theatrical work as an experience ofduration rather than that instantaneousness wherein one is given theunlimited fullness of the genuine, composed, and compound work at aglance. This is to say that the experience of the genuinely modernistwork seems to have no duration because “at every moment the work itselfis wholly manifest.”11 The totality of the work is given momently and inthe instant. This presentness defeats theater. It’s the aversion of atten-tion from the object that is given in and by a moment’s attention tothe compositionally enframed, rather than a lifetime’s everyday atten-tion precisely to the quotidian presence of things. But Piper is all aboutWghting what Fried refuses to recognize: the absolute ongoingnessand continuity not of attention to objects but of the aversion of one’sgaze from objects. So that the intensity and grace of presentness, ofthe experience of a work that at every moment is wholly manifest, is


opposed not to some inWnitely durative experience of the object but tothe inWnite avoidance of certain objects. Just because we are all literal-ists most of our lives does not mean that we actually ever pay atten-tion to or experience objects in their intensity. What one is after, byway of a certain sustenance of attention, is the presentness of theobject in all of its internal difference, in all of its interiority and inter-nal space. The stakes of such disruption of the aversion of the gaze atobjects are especially high when object, person, commodity, artist, andartwork converge. The glance, this averted gaze, is realigned by theforce of a glancing, appositional blow; the internal dialogue is inter-rupted by a voice from outside; subjection as beholding is cut by asharp objection.

In a eulogy for John Coltrane, Baraka echoes Trane’s self-assessment:“He wanted to be the opposite.”12

To act on the desire to be the opposite, the desire not to collaborate, isto object. How might such resistance suspend the process of subjection?

Here is one of what Piper calls her “metaperformances.”

Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City

Max’s was an Art Environment, replete with Art Consciousness and Self-

Consciousness about Art Consciousness. To even walk into Max’s was to

be absorbed into the collective Art Self-Consciousness, either as object

or as collaborator. I didn’t want to be absorbed as a collaborator, because

that would mean having my own consciousness co-opted and modiWed by

that of others: It would mean allowing my consciousness to be inXuenced

by their perceptions of art, and exposing my perceptions of art to their

consciousness, and I didn’t want that. I have always had a very strong

individualistic streak. My solution was to privatize my own consciousness

as much as possible, by depriving it of sensory input from that environ-

ment; to isolate it from all tactile, aural, and visual feedback. In doing

so I presented myself as a silent, secret, passive object, seemingly ready to


be absorbed into their consciousness as an object. But I learned that com-

plete absorption was impossible, because my voluntary objectlike passivity

implied aggressive activity and choice, an independent presence confront-

ing the Art-Conscious environment with its autonomy. My objecthood

became my subjecthood.13

Till now, Daniel Paul Schreber’s has been the prototypical body with-out organs, an exemplary becoming-objective or becoming-animal inthe words of Derrida, on the one hand, Deleuze and Guattari, on theother.14 Schreber’s screams are always coupled with a being-entered,which he characterizes as an unmanning or feminization, a kind of tute-lage self-imposed and self-overcome. This is important: the body withoutorgans marks a certain psychotic enlightenment, the re-en-genderingdisruption or overcoming of a self-imposed tutelage. One could think,therefore, psychotic enlightenment or becoming-object as a motive ofdesiring-production. But now, Piper is exemplary of the body-without-organs. The Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City marks thisbecoming-objective of an object, ears shut, eyes pinched, a refusal ofcollaboration, a positive resistance to the “self-consciousness of art-consciousness,” to self-consciousness as art-consciousness, in all of itsoedipalization. To be absorbed into their consciousness like a depthcharge. A passive aggression of the object, a recalibration of absorption,that Fried does not anticipate. And this by way of a dematerialization;in other words, the subject becomes an object by way of a sensory shut-down. This is, among other things, an enactment at the end of a long,dematerialized transmission of another performance that works by wayof violently imposed sensory overload, rather than voluntary sensorydeprivation, even though the screaming soundtrack animates the objectbody-in-performance with a force that exceeds either subjunctive oractual speech. Being materially tied to such immaterially transmittedscenes, there is, inevitably, the desire for the maintenance, in Piper, of acertain privacy. This would be the resistance to deformation, to beingmessed up or messed with by others, by the omnipresent and oppressiveother. This is to say that she is moving in, has already recognized


the riches and satisfactions of interiority, the blessed, invaluable side

effect of repeatedly thwarted communication. Not for such as me the

luxuries of repression, absent-mindedness, or inchoate thought subli-

mates into impulsive or irresponsible behavior. . . . So instead we consider

what we see but are prevented from voicing. We take it into our selves,

we muse on it and analyze it, we scrutinize it, extract its meaning and

lesson, and record it for future reference. Our unspoken or unacknowl-

edged contributions to discourse infuse our mental lives with conceptual

subtlety. We become deep, perceptive, alert, and resourceful.

It seems to me now that the writings in these two volumes are

best understood as evolving expressions of a coerced, reXective interior-

ity that develops in response to my increasing grasp of the point: that I

am not, after all, entitled simply to externalize my creative impulses in

unreXective action or products, because, being merely a foreign guest in

the private club in which I entertain, my self-conWdent attempts at objec-

tive communication with my audience would be permanently garbled,

censored, ridiculed, or ignored, were it not for a critical and discursive

matrix that I—with effort—eventually supply.15

And the recognition of this privilege-that-is-not-one of interiority is allbound up not only with what it has meant at times to take on preciselythose perquisites that we associate with what Piper calls “the upper-middle-class heterosexual WASP male, the pampered only son of dotingparents.”16 It is, more fundamentally, the extension of that experimental,performative, objectional, sensually theoretical, public privacy that ani-mates the aesthetics of the black radical tradition.

This double-identiWcation, with both Aunt Hester and the Master,the substitutive mother and never fully constituted father, links Piperto Douglass. This is to say that Piper’s performance work moves at theintersection of a feminist, anti-slavery aesthetic and the emergence andconvergence of conceptual and minimalist art. This black feminist, anti-slavery minimalism makes possible the reappearance of the art objectafter the fact of the disappearance of the object that conceptual art hadinstantiated. This reappearance or reassertion of the object (of the artist


as art object in the case of Piper) moves along speciWc lines. Butler putsforward an extraordinarily rigorous model of subjectivity-as-subjection,a model that knows the subject by way of the severity of its (politicaland, especially, temporal) limits. Meanwhile, Hartman is thinking theway these limits of subjectivity/subjection are negotiated in the livedexperience of and opposition to slavery and in the transition from slav-ery to “freedom.” Piper’s work seems to be tapping into some thingsthat go on in the Weld Butler and Hartman explore. These thingsindicate a lived critique of the assumed equivalence of personhood andsubjectivity and, by extension, a force of resistance or objection that isalways already in excess of the limits of subjection/subjectivity. In theend, Piper’s conceptualism allows her rich historical animation of theminimalist object. Ironically, this force of objection is best describedin Fried’s dismissal of it, his recoil from that force of the object thatanimates minimalism.

Here is Greenberg from his essay “Modernist Painting”:

I identify Modernism with the intensiWcation, almost the exacer-

bation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher

Kant. Because he was the Wrst to criticize the means itself of criticism, I

conceive of Kant as the Wrst real Modernist.

The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of character-

istic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order

to subvert it but in order to entrench it more Wrmly in its area of com-

petence. Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, and while he

withdrew much from its old jurisdiction, logic was left all the more secure

in what there remained to it.

The self-criticism of Modernism grows out of, but is not the same

thing as, the criticism of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment criti-

cized from the outside, the way criticism in its accepted sense does;

Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the procedures themselves

of that which is being criticized.17


If, as Greenberg suggests, Kant is the Wrst modernist, Piper might bethe last. And the question concerning the source of Piper’s modernismis undetached from that concerning the source of Kant’s. Piper’s imma-nence, toward which she is ambivalent in the extreme, is out from theoutside.

Something like a Wnal approach to that immanence requires a fewmore questions. What is an object? What are the limits of the object?More speciWcally (and crucially, for Piper the philosopher and Friedthe aesthetician, both working within complex Kantian genealogies),what is the relation between the (multiple: Ding, Gegenstand, Objekt)notion of the object offered by Kant and the rather more undifferenti-ated notions of the object offered by Fried and Piper?18 Fried claims,after Stanley Cavell, that for Kant the artwork is not an object. Whatkind of object is speciWcally not the artwork for Kant? And what doesthe artwork’s limit, boundary, frame, its parergon, have to do with suchan object? Would the parergon count as differential in the work of artfor Fried? This is to ask, is it syntactical? The answer appears to beyes. Does a Friedian object, precisely as nonartwork, “have” a parergon,a constitutive outside-on-the-inside? The answer appears to be no;only the artwork, and not the object, only the meaningful or meaning-producing representation “has” the parergon. One could also ask: Doesthe minimalist or literalist object/work (and the point, here, is the com-plex encountering of the object and the work) have a support, a frame,a boundary? Note that to have, here, is to confront or engage the sup-port by way of Wguration, as if dealing with the fact of the support byway of Wguration actually makes the support, as parergon, a (possessory)fact. And does the minimalist work/object have a support/frame/bound-ary that sharply divides it from its milieu (as milieu is given in sharpdistinction from the parergon by Derrida in The Truth in Painting)? Per-haps the real importance of the frame/support/boundary is that itdivides the work from the milieu that deWnes and contains what Frieddescribes as our quotidian literalism. The parergon is, here, the condi-tion of possibility of what Fried valorizes and hopes for: presentness as


grace, presentness as opposed to presence. The literalist work/object iswithout or in denial of the parergon. The two relations to be thought,here, are lack and denial, parergon and milieu.

The relationship between object and objectivity in Piper is disjunc-tive. Think about objectivity as universality, as a set of faculties or attri-butes given in the set of human beings; objectivity is the quality of beinguniversal, that which is true for everyone. When Piper speaks aboutwanting to eliminate subjective judgments (i.e., valuative or aestheticjudgments, the question of beauty and, even, pleasure—what might havebeen called the immanent aesthetic) from her experience of art, she moveswithin a certain desire for the objective (i.e., epistemological/ethical, thecategorical and its imperatives, the transcendental aesthetic as the ideal-ity of space-time) in art. Similarly, when Piper turns herself into an objectof art she could be said to be moving in the desire for a detachment fromcertain subjective/invalid judgments. What she calls, in her descriptionof the Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, the self-consciousnessof art-consciousness, especially in that it is shaped by the visual pathol-ogy of racist categorization, is the Weld of such bad judgment.

But Piper seems to deny the implications of what is, for Kant, anenabling paradox: the objective-transcendental ground of humanityseems inseparable from a certain subjective condition of its possibility—the ideality of space-time is always conditioned, made possible, by a spe-ciWc experience of space-time. And this experience or immanence isalways susceptible, has always been susceptible, to bad judgment, tothe irrationality that is, at once, constitutive of the rational and therational’s necessary extension when it reaches its limits. And in this lastlies the rub since one must tap into the possibility of bad judgment—aesthetic judgment—in order precisely to work these necessary aug-mentations of (devolved or delimited) rationality. The repression ordenial of the subjective conditions of objectivity in Piper’s philosophyis overcome by an aggressive critique of the subject enacted in and bythe rematerialization of the object. But this rematerialization of theobject is always also the rematerialization of the artwork. So that therepression or denial of the subject/ive, which moves into a critique


of the subject/ive, is enacted by way of a return or recovery of thesubject/ive where the subject /ive is (the) reanimated, rematerializedpersonhood as objet d’art.

If the categorical imperative were an art object, what would it looklike? What does art or the immanent aesthetic do to the categoricalimperative or to category as such? It deregulates it, cuts and augmentsit. It also founds it. This is what Piper philosophically represses andartistically enacts in both her philosophy and her art. Kant’s philosophy,in its perhaps inadvertent openness to the irrational condition of pos-sibility of rationality, is more radical than Piper’s; but Piper’s art is aradical improvisation of Kant’s philosophical radicalism. This long pas-sage from The Truth in Painting allows a fuller exposition of this:

Is the palace I’m speaking about beautiful? All kinds of answers can miss

the point of the question. If I say, I don’t like things made for idle gawpers,

or else, like the Iroquois sachem, I prefer the pubs, or else, in the manner

of Rousseau, what we have here is a sign of the vanity of the great who

exploit the people in order to produce frivolous things, or else if I were

on a desert island and if I had the means to do so, I would still not go to

the trouble of having it imported, etc., none of these answers constitutes

an intrinsically aesthetic judgment. I have evaluated this palace in fact in

terms of extrinsic motives, in terms of empirical psychology, of economic

relations of production, of political structures, of technical causality, etc.

Now you have to know what you’re talking about, what intrinsically

concerns the value “beauty” and what remains external to your immanent

sense of beauty. This permanence—to distinguish between the internal or

proper sense and the circumstance of the object being talked about—orga-

nizes all philosophical discourses on art, on the meaning of art and mean-

ing as such, from Plato to Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. This requirement

presupposes a discourse on the limit between the inside and outside of the

art object, here a discourse on the frame. Where is it to be found?

What they want to know, according to Kant, when they ask me if I

Wnd this palace beautiful, is if I Wnd that it is beautiful, in other words if

the mere presentation of the object—in itself, within itself—pleases me,


if it produces in me a pleasure, however indifferent [gleichgültig] I may

remain to the existence of that object. “It is quite plain that in order to

say that the object is beautiful, and to show that I have taste, everything

turns on the meaning which I can give to this representation, and not on

any factor which makes me dependent on the real existence of the object.

Every one must allow that a judgment on the beautiful which is tinged

with the slightest interest, is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste.

One must not be in the least prepossessed in favour of the real existence

of the thing [Existenz der Sache], but must preserve complete indifference

in this respect, in order to play the part of judge in matters of taste.19

Remember that for Fried, working in a Kantian mode by way ofGreenberg, the authentic experience of the authentic work of art is anexperience of the work as representation, as that which is productiveof meaning. It is an experience in which the beholder discerns thatmeaning, and discerns it momently, immediately, in its entirety, in theentirety of its internal differentiation, as if it were a sign. To the extentthat this raises the question of the limit or frame of the artwork, onecould understand that Fried, after Greenberg, thinks the speciWcity ofmodernist painting as the critical engagement with the limit in its lim-itations, limits here being Xatness, the Xatness, literally, of the support,of the bounded enframedness of the painting. For it is the frame thatmarks the limit of signiWcance and the boundary between the real exis-tence of the object and any possible aesthetic consideration. Inauthen-ticity occurs when the object aggressively foists itself upon the beholder,theatrically so, so that the beholder is forced to encounter its material-ity, a materiality that has to be reduced in order to discern its mean-ing. But it’s important to note that this inauthenticity is a violation notjust of a contingent, presently needful formulation of the essence ofpainting, but of a more general and transhistorical formulation regard-ing the possibility of discerning beauty as such. More speciWcally, theproximity of the questions concerning the support or Xatness in Friedand Greenberg to the questions concerning artwork and frame—ergonand parergon—in Kant is an immeasurable nearness.


Meanwhile, the parergon is as problematic for Piper as it is forFried. It is, for her, the extraesthetic that can impinge upon a certain pri-vatized interiority of the art work/er. For him, it’s the charged atmos-phere that surrounds the literalist object. For both, one might say, theparergon marks the interinanimation of (the question of the work’s)totality and ideology. For both, the parergon, in a way, is inseparablefrom context, milieu. But both would, in various ways, deny this charge.Here again is Derrida:

In the search for the cause or the knowledge of principles, one must avoid

letting the parerga get the upper hand over the essentials. . . . Philosophi-

cal discourse will always have been against the parergon. But what about

this against.

A parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon,

the work done [ fait], the fact [le fait], the work, but it does not fall to one

side, it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain out-

side. Neither simply outside nor simply inside. Like an accessory that one

is obliged to welcome on the border, on board [au bord, à bord]. It is Wrst

of all the on (the) bo(a)rd(er) [il est d’abord l’à-bord].

. . . The parergon, this supplement outside the work, must, if it is to

have the status of a philosophical quasi-concept, designate a formal and

general predicative structure, which one can transport intact or deformed

or reformed according to certain rules, into other Welds, to submit new con-

tents to it.20

There is nothing between the elements of the work and its content.There is the atmosphere, the context, that brushes up against the work,like an adornment, one could say, carrying an always possible deforma-tion. The accessory or augmentation that cuts, an invaginative foreignguest one is obliged to welcome on the border, a boarder, the exterior-ity that interiority can’t do without, the co-operator. Piper is disturbedby the parergon, even as she is both the parergon and that which, inFried’s eyes, continually, duratively reproduces or, at least, charges, theparergon. Meanwhile, for Fried, when the object, by way of a strange


reversal, is made to stand in for the representation of the object, whenpresence stands in for presentness, when literalness stands in for or rep-resents representation by way of a vulgarization of abstraction, then allyou have is context, all you have is parergon in the absence of the art-work, in the oppressive and aggressive presence of the object. Derrida,here, in summarizing Kant, perfectly encompasses Fried’s attitudetoward the literalist object:

What is bad, external to the pure object of taste, is thus what seduces by an

attraction: and the example of what leads astray by its force of attraction

is a color, the gilding, in as much as it is nonform, content, or sensory

matter. The deterioration of the parergon, the perversion, the adorn-

ment, is the attraction of sensory matter. As design, organization of lines,

forming of angles, the frame is not at all an adornment and one cannot do

without it. But in its purity it ought to remain colorless, deprived of all

empirical sensory materiality.21

Modern painting, for instance, is, Wnally, in a struggle not so much withthe support that it cannot do without, or, more generally, with the out-side that co-operates in its operation. It is, rather, struggling with theexteriority of what is internal to it—not the primordial conventionthat it is there to be beheld, but the primordial actuality of its sensorymateriality. That brushing against of the parergon is itself a complexsubstitute for the more fundamental problem of the irreducible sensorymateriality of the work/object itself, the disruptive exteriority of whatis most central, most interior, to the work itself. The lack of meaning,the hollowness of the literalist object is, as Fried himself admits, virtual.The parergon corresponds, Wnally, not to a lack within the work (a hol-lowness in Fried’s formulations) but to a certain material fullness ofthe work that presents itself as a lack of—or, more precisely, as an irre-ducible and irreducibly disruptive supplement to—meaning. As Derridasays, “What constitutes them as parerga is not simply their exteriorityas a surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to thelack in the interior of the ergon.”22 But when Derrida says that parergon


intervenes, in Kant, between the material and the formal, we need tobe aware that this intervention carries its own shadow. The material isa lack in that it is also a supplement to form (which is its supplement).It’s as if the material is understood as a lack of the Wgural in form. Butwe know, again by way of and through Derrida, that the material—in/asthe parergon, in/as the milieu—Wgures too. Derrida says that the par-ergon stands out not only from the ergon but from the milieu. It standsout like a Wgure from the ground, but it stands out from the Wgure as aground. And it stands out, with respect to each of these, in some mergerwith the other of these. But I would argue that the milieu (the externalworld into which one would or must withdraw) is a ground, as well. Sothat the parergon could be said to be a Wgure that stands out from threegrounds: milieu, object, Wrst Wgure. And to the extent that the parergonhas catalytic effects, it reproduces the milieu as Wgure. The material Wg-ures, re/con/Wgures, the milieu.

Meanwhile, what about the question of beauty, not only for Piper,but of Piper? What about the beauty of Piper and of Piper’s work, thebeauty of Piper as Piper’s work? Piper is the parergon, the foreign guest,withdrawing from the artwork and the art world, into the exterior,into the external world, into that which makes the withdrawal possible,that which demands it, namely the fact that it is this exteriority—thisconvergence of materiality and milieu, this material reconWguration ofmilieu, this understanding of materiality as milieu—that is most inter-nal to the work, that is most proper to the work, that is the essence ofthe work. The parergon is beautiful. In this sense, Piper’s work is not asuspension of the aesthetic but a kind of return to it, precisely by wayof its materiality. You don’t have to privilege the ethical over the aes-thetic in art if the aesthetic remains the condition of possibility of theethical in art.

But Piper would enact such privilege in part as a function of herdenial of the pseudorational in Kant. This denial is a repression by wayof problematic distinctions between the “minor” or lesser writings andthe critical philosophy (though the Third Critique, in both the differ-ent senses of Piper and Deleuze[/Guattari] would be a minor writing


too). We ought to look at the Third Critique not only to engage itsracist foundations (which Spivak points out so well and which RobertBernasconi also examines in some recent essays) but, deeper still, to seethe whole complex interplay of accord and discord that not only disturbsthe racist foundations of the Third Critique but their prior manifesta-tion as a certain foundation for the transcendental aspirations of theFirst Critique.23 And such an examination of those foundations wouldseem to be necessary to precisely that antiracist expansion of categorythat Piper’s artwork seeks to enact. Is the body without organs, theensemble of the senses, the limit of the faculties? This gets back tothe link between Aunt Hester’s Passion and the Untitled Performancefor Max’s Kansas City.24 And what’s the relation between the limits ofthe faculties (and the limits of the work of art) and the relations of thefaculties each to the other? And the relations of these to the ensembleof the senses and their relations each to the other? Does the body with-out organs constitute the performance/recording of these relations?The critique of the hegemony of the visual (in art and life) and therecalibration of the faculties/senses and their ensembles: both have todo with the relation between these expansive, invaginative and invagi-nated ensembles and the expansive universality, the nonexclusionaryuniversality of the categories. Meanwhile, it’s not that racism, or xeno-phobia more generally, is a visual pathology as much as it is about therelation between the hegemony of the visual in art, life, racism, and theirintersection. So part of what’s at stake in Piper’s work is not an eclipseof the visual but its rematerialization, which Fried would recognizeand abdure. But not only this. It’s a rematerialization or reinitializationof visual pleasure and visual desire, as well. As Derrida says on and afterKant, it was always about pleasure all the time. The question Piper raisesfor us (it’s not a new question, just different, now), perhaps against her-self, is this: can the object not only resist visual pleasure but resist by wayof visual pleasure? Is the problem visuality or pleasure? Both. Neither.

Piper talks of partitioning herself in order to avoid accommodat-ing people’s needs for an oversimpliWed other. Such overt internal dif-ferentiation in the name of complexity—of syntax, if you will—would


make Fried proud. It is, of course, part of the particular work Piper hasdone to make herself into an art object. Like funk music (in her under-standing of it), Piper is modular, syntactical, internally differentiated,polyrhythmic, high fantastical. But compartmentalization is all boundup with privatization even if that privatization, that taking on of alltasks in the Wgure of one, is later to be resocialized by way of morehumane forms of exchange. We could think all this as a conXict of thefaculties, but if we did we’d also have to think a certain valorization ofcounterpoint, here, a kind of embrace of the interplay of accord anddiscord, along lines Deleuze opens up, lines to and out of the ThirdCritique—lines of deregulation. Such deregulation is all bound up withthe limit, with that being that is neither inside nor outside, that Piperreproduces, as herself, as her artwork.25

In the transition from slave labor to free labor, the site or force or occa-sion of value is transferred from labor to labor power. This is to say thatvalue is extracted from the ground of intrinsic worth (remember Marx’sbemusement at the confusion that troubles the writings of Englishpolitical economists who deploy “a Teutonic word for the actual thing,and a Romance word for its reXection”) and becomes the potential to pro-duce value.26 This transference and transformation is also a dematerial-ization—again, a transition from the body, more fully the person, ofthe laborer to a potential that operates in excess of the body, in thebody’s eclipse, in the disappearance of a certain responsibility for thebody. This will crystallize, later, in the impossible Wgure of the com-modity that emerges as if from nowhere, the Wgure that is essential tothat possessive and dispossessed modality of subjectivity that Marx callsalienation. Meanwhile, what Aunt Hester enacts, by way of the partici-pant observation of Douglass and the master, by way of Douglass’srecitation and its concomitant recitations in music and in the discourseon music, is a rematerialization of value. Now the commodity is rema-terialized in the body of the worker just as the worker’s body is remate-rialized as the speaking, shrieking, sounding commodity, each emergingnot from some originary moment but through the catalytic force of an


event before natality. This rematerialization is a music Marx’s demate-rialization demands. This is to say that the dematerialization that isnecessary to a universal revolution and the universal science of revolu-tion is in anticipation of a rematerialization that Marx predicts withoutworking toward, or produces without discovering in Althusser’s idiom,in the 1844 Manuscripts.27 Aunt Hester’s performance-in-objection is akind of parergon, an outwork, a preWgurative working out, or supple-mental materialization before the fact, of Marxian science. Whereas the1844 Manuscripts spookily prophesies the rematerialization of value incommunism, Aunt Hester actually enacts the senses as “theoreticians intheir immediate practice.”28 Here, communism is given as discoveryprocedure and not just as discovery along lines Marx himself wouldactually endorse: as he says, “Communism is the act of positing as thenegation of the negation, and is therefore a real phase, necessary for thenext period of historical development, in the emancipation and recov-ery of mankind. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamicprinciple of the immediate future, but communism is not as such thegoal of human development—the form of human society.”29

So Aunt Hester is, at this point, that which Piper reenacts and/orcalls for: the artist(-critic-dealer-collector-art historian-social theorist)-as-art-object, the invaginated totality or gathering—the locus andlogos—of a division of labor, the (audiovisual) rematerialization ofvalue. And just as C. L. R. James could assert—by way of a kind of magicthat seems impossible but whose reality is something to which everyworker might surreptitiously attest—that socialism is already in placeon the shop Xoor, so can we assert, by way of Aunt Hester and thetheoretical catalysis she enacts, that communism-in-(the resistance to)slavery is the discovery procedure for communism out from slavery’soutside. Meanwhile, Aunt Hester’s performance-in-objection is recitedfor us in Douglass, then transmitted or transferred, by way of a repres-sive dematerialization, into a discourse on music. Aunt Hester enactsa rematerialization that is a necessary preface to, though it emergesonly after the fact of, dematerialization. It’s a cutting augmentationof Marx’s own necessary materialist preface, in “Private Property and


Communism,” to the dematerializing theoretical forces that are gath-ered and unleashed in Capital that Piper re-performs, forging new rela-tions of production and reproduction in this socialization of objectionand its surplus. This is what objection is, what performance is—an inter-nal complication of the object that is, at the same time, her withdrawalinto the external world. Such withdrawal makes possible communica-tion between seemingly unbridgeable spaces, times, and persons.

In the end, what I’m trying to get to is this: there is a massive and densediscourse on the object, on what it will be in communism, on what itwill bring about as communism, that Marx puts forward in 1844. Mostsimply put, communism is that “positive supersession of private propertyas human self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the humanessence through and for man” that is actually constituted in and by andas a new approach of and toward the object.30 Marx adds, “To sumup: it is only when man’s object becomes a human object or objectiveman that man does not lose himself in that object. This is only possiblewhen it becomes a social object for him and when he himself becomesa social being for himself, just as society becomes a being for him inthis object.”31 Black radicalism, the invagination and rematerializationof what Cedric Robinson calls “the ontological totality,” might be per-formed in and as the arrival at becoming-social in the vexed and vexingexchange of roles; in and as the differentialized and ensemblic recali-bration of the senses. For Marx, “[t]he domination of the objectiveessence within me, the sensuous outburst of my essential activity, ispassion, which here becomes the activity of my being.”32 Aunt Hester’sobjective passion anticipates this Marxian formulation that is later re-conWgured by Piper’s seemingly passionless objection. In the UntitledPerformance for Max’s Kansas City, Piper silently transmits Aunt Hester’sshriek, opening herself to its disruptive force even as she closes herselfoff to the sensory experience of the “artworld.” To think Aunt Hester andPiper, individually and together, is to think not only what it means to rec-ognize and deny, protect and risk, the complex interiority of the object,but also what it means to re-objectify the work of art, to revisualize it


by way of an old recording, to rematerialize its opticality by way of thesound and song of what Marx couldn’t even imagine, the commodity whoshrieked, by way of what Fried couldn’t even visualize, the object whoseinfusion with the resistant aurality of a tradition of politico-economicaspiration and whose concomitant and necessarily theatrical personhoodbound to whatever lies before her own troubled self-making, made herart making art.


Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream

1. Blackness, in all of its constructed imposition, can tend and hastended toward the experimental achievement and tradition of an advanced,transgressive publicity. Blackness is, therefore, a special site and resources for atask of articulation where immanence is structured by an irreducibly impro-visatory exteriority that can occasion something very much like sadness andsomething very much like devilish enjoyment. To record this improvisationalimmanence—where untraceable, anoriginal rootedness and unenclosed, dis-closing outness converge, where that convergence is articulation by and throughan inWnitesimal and unbridgeable break—is a daunting task. This is becauseblackness is always a disruptive surprise moving in the rich nonfullness of everyterm it modiWes. Such mediation suspends neither the question of identity northe question of essence. Rather, blackness, in its irreducible relation to thestructuring force of radicalism and the graphic, montagic conWgurings of tradi-tion, and, perhaps most importantly, in its very manifestation as the inscrip-tional events of a set of performances, requires another thinking of identity andessence. This thinking converges with the re-emergent question of the humanthat self-critical articulation demands. Such articulation implies and enactsan unorthodox essentialism wherein essence and performance are not mutuallyexclusive. How does this Weld of convergence, this ensemble, work? By way ofthe afWrmative force of ruthless negation, the out and rooted critical lyricismof screams, prayers, curses, gestures, steps (to and away)—the long, frenziedtumult of a nonexclusionary essay. Racism and oppression are necessary but not

Notes

255

sufWcient conditions of such advance. This is to say that if alienation and distancerepresent the critical possibility of freedom, they do so where the question ofthe human is most clearly rendered as the question of a kind of competence thatis performed as an inWnite set of variations of blackness. Hartman’s work seemsto me to have brilliantly recalibrated the investigation of this set though thequestion concerning the proper objecthood of this object remains.

Asha Varadharajan addresses this problem. She writes: “Clearly, then,there is a need for a theory that is sensitive both to the complicity betweenknowledge and power and to the possibility of resistance on the part of theobjects of the power-knowledge nexus.” Varadharajan is interested not only inhow the production of knowledge enables domination but in how it “can alsoserve the cause of emancipatory critique and of resistance.” For Varadharajan,“Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics . . . seems to offer this double oppor-tunity. His notion of the dialectical relation that obtains between subject andobject simultaneously insists on the carapace of identity that encloses the sub-ject and on the resistance of the object to the subject’s identiWcations.” There-fore, the goal of her project is “to shift the focus from the decentered subject tothe resistant object and to disentangle the practice of epistemology from theviolence of appropriation.” While we differ, to a certain extent, on the place ofAdorno (and poststructuralism) in the development of such a project, and whileit seems to me that disentanglement might not be the proper way to think therelation between violence and the emergence of liberatory critique, I want openlyto avow Varadharajan’s projects and to acknowledge my echo of her phrasing.My intellectual debt to Hartman is even more fundamental and is manifestalways and everywhere in this book. See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection:Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1997), 4, and Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity inAdorno, Said, and Spivak (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xii.

I’d like to acknowledge a few more inXuences. One of the most forma-tive—especially in its investigation of black literature’s disruptive reconWgura-tion of totality—is Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature:A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Any explo-ration of “resistant orality” (in its complex relation to an often submerged orsubversive literacy) in slave narrative, of its gendered foundations and implica-tions, is now impossible without the work of Harryette Mullen. I am indebtedto her Gender and the Subjugated Body: Readings of Race, Subjectivity, and Difference

256 – NOTES TO “RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT”

in the Construction of Slave Narratives (Ph.D. diss., University of California, SantaCruz, 1990). See also her “Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’sCabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved,” in The Culture ofSentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed.Shirley Samuels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 244–64. “Optic White:Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” Diacritics 24, no. 2–3 (summer–fall1994): 71–89; and “Africa Signs and Spirit Writing,” Callaloo 19, no. 3 (1996):670–89. For a liberating disruption of Frederick Douglass’s self-proclaimed, oft-echoed, and openly gendered representative priority, I have returned often toDeborah E. McDowell, “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and theAfro-American Narrative Tradition,” in African American Autobiography: ACollection of Critical Essays, ed. William L. Andrews (Engelwood Cliffs, N.J.:Prentice Hall, 1993), 35–58. The analysis of the impact of black vocal perfor-mance on ocularcentric Western notions of value in Lindon Barrett, Blacknessand Value: Seeing Double (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) hasbeen especially helpful. In studying the ongoing development of the culture ofthe resistance to slavery I have relied on Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nation-alist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1987) and Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness:Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1977). Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000) and Aldon Lynn Nielsen, BlackChant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1997) are invaluable treatments of the experimental drive inblack music, writing and performance. I have beneWted from the address ofthe migratory shifts, submerged ground, and reproductive soundings of Afro-diasporic thought and performance found in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1993), and Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Finally, for making me believein the radical and sensual performativity of haints in literary, photographic,and phonographic narrative, I gratefully acknowledge Avery F. Gordon, GhostlyMatters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1997).

2. See Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). In this book I attempt to analyze

NOTES TO “RESISTANCE OF THE OBJECT” – 257

the limits and potentialities of black performance’s re-en-gendering force and,in so doing, move along a trajectory illuminated by the whole of Butler’s work.

3. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 44. Here begins a major element of this book: a respectful challenge to

Peggy Phelan’s ontology of performance that is predicated on the notion of per-formance’s operating wholly outside economies of reproduction. See “TheOntology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction,” Unmarked:The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993).

5. Derrida speaks of invagination within the context of a discourse ongenre and its relation to the concept of set or totality: “It is precisely a princi-ple of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code ofset theories, if I may use it at least Wguratively, I would speak of a sort of par-ticipation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, withouthaving membership in a set. With the inevitable dividing of the trait that marksmembership, the boundary of the set comes to form by invagination an internalpocket larger than the whole; and the outcome of this division and of thisabounding remains as singular as it is limitless.” See Jacques Derrida, “The Lawof Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1981), 55.

6. Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook, Callaloo Fiction Series, vol. 2(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 34.

7. Here are the relevant passages in full. I’ll return to them quasi-obsessively throughout this text. The Wrst two passages are from Bedouin Horn-book, 30, 34–35.

“Some would say it’s not my place to make comments on what I’ve writ-ten, but let me suggest that what’s most notably at issue in the Accompaniments’he/she confrontation is a binary round of works and deeds whereby the deadaccost a ground of uncapturable ‘stations.’ The point is that any insistence onlocale must have long since given way to locus, that the rainbow bridge whichmakes for unrest ongoingly echoes what creaking the rickety bed of conceptionmakes. I admit this is business we’ve been over before, but bear with it longenough to hear the cricketlike chirp one gets from the guitar in most reggaebands as the echoic spectre of a sexual ‘cut’ (sexed/unsexed, seeded/unsown,etc.)—‘ineffable glints or vaguely audible grunts of unavoidable alarm.’”

“You got me all wrong on what I meant by ‘a sexual “cut”’ in my lastletter. I’m not, as you insinuate, advancing severance as a value, much less


pushing, as you put it, ‘a thinly veiled romance of distantiation.’ I put the word‘cut,’ remember, in quotes. What I was trying to get at was simply the feelingI’ve gotten from the characteristic, almost clucking beat one hears in reggae,where the syncopation comes down like a blade, a ‘broken’ claim to connection.Here I put the word ‘broken’ in quotes to get across the point that the pathosone can’t help hearing in that claim mingles with a retreating sense of peril, asthough danger itself were beaten back by the boldness, however ‘broken,’ of itscall to connection. The image I get is one of a rickety bridge (sometimes a rick-ety boat) arching Wner than a hair to touch down on the sands at, say, Abidjan.Listening to Burning Spear the other night, for example, I drifted off to whereit seemed I was being towed into an abandoned harbor. I wasn’t exactly a boatbut I felt my anchorlessness as a lack, as an inured, eventually visible pit up fromwhich I Xoated, looking down on what debris looking into it left. By that time,though, I turned out to be a snake hissing, ‘You did it, you did it,’ rattling andweeping waterless tears. Some such Xight (an insistent previousness evading eachand every natal occasion) comes close to what I mean by ‘cut.’ I don’t knowabout you, but my sense is that waterless tears don’t have a thing to do withromance, that in fact if anything actually breaks it’s the blade. ‘Sexual’ comesinto it only because the word ‘he’ and the word ‘she’ rummage about in the crypteach deWnes for the other, reconvening as whispers at the chromosome level asthough the crypt had been a crib, a lulling mask, all along. In short, it’s apoca-lypse I’m talking, not courtship.

“Forgive me, though, if this sounds at all edgy, maybe garbled at points.My ears literally burn with what the words don’t manage to say.”

The third passage is from “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol,” inDiscrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing,Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture 71 (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1993), 232.

“Gisalo songs are sung at funerals and during spirit-medium seancesand have the melodic contour of the cry of a kind of fruitdove, the muni bird.This reXects and is founded on the myth regarding the origin of music, themyth of the boy who became a muni bird. The myth tells of a boy who goes tocatch crayWsh with his older sister. He catches none and repeatedly begs forthose caught by his sister, who again and again refuses his request. Finally hecatches a shrimp and puts it over his nose, causing it to turn a bright purple red,the color of the muni bird’s beak. His hands turn into wings and when he opens


his mouth to speak the falsetto cry of a muni bird comes out. As he Xies away,his sister begs him to come back and have some of the crayWsh but his criescontinue and become a song, semi-wept, semi-sung: ‘Your crayWsh you didn’tgive me. I have no sister. I’m hungry. . . .’ For the Kaluli, then, the quintessentialsource of music is the orphan’s ordeal—an orphan being anyone denied kinship,social sustenance, anyone who suffers, to use Orlando Patterson’s phrase, ‘socialdeath,’ the prototype for which is the boy who becomes a muni bird. Song isboth a complaint and a consolation dialectically tied to that ordeal, where inback of ‘orphan’ one hears echoes of ‘orphic,’ a music that turns on abandon-ment, absence, loss. Think of the black spiritual ‘Motherless Child.’ Music iswounded kinship’s last resort.”

8. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J.Michael Dash (Charlottesville: Caraf Books/University Press of Virginia,1989), 123–24.

9. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. BenFowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 176–77.

10. Marx, “Communism and Private Property,” in Early Writings, trans.Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage, 1975), 356.

11. Ibid., 352.12. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris

(La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986), 116–17. Derrida cites fragments of an earlierEnglish version of this passage in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri ChakravortySpivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 53. However,he mutes, by way of ellipses, the Marxian echo, thereby postponing or, moreprecisely, drastically slowing the tempo of his own critical engagement withMarx even as he moves within the revolutionary wake of Marx’s dematerializingdrive. This book is partly conceived as a kind of tarrying in the break or brokentime of that encounter. For a brilliant reassertion, to or through Saussure, of thebody and its materiality, see (especially the footnotes of ) John L. Jackson Jr.,“Ethnophysicality, or An Ethnography of Some Body,” in Soul: Black Power, Pol-itics, and Pleasure (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 172–90.

13. I borrow the term “passionate utterance” from Stanley Cavell,“Wagers of Writing: Has Pragmatism Inherited Emerson?” unpublished paperdelivered at the University of Iowa, 22 June 1995.

14. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An AmericanGrammar Book,” Diacritics (summer 1987): 80.


15. Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitu-tion, Labor and Capital, trans. Hilary Creek (New York: Autonomedia, 1995), 10.

16. Ibid., 7–8.17. See Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical

Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 171.18. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An

American Slave, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. In The Classic Slave Naratives (NewYork: Mentor Books, 1987), 259.

19. Ibid., 262–63.20. For a more elaborate reading of Brown’s relation to Douglass, see my

“Bridge and One,” in Performing Hybridity, ed. May Joseph and Jennifer Fink(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

21. These are notes taken during a presentation by Abbey Lincoln atthe Ford Foundation Jazz Study Group, Columbia University, November 1999.

1. The Sentimental Avant-Garde

1. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey(New York: W. W. Norton, 1949), 18.

2. There is archival footage of an interview with Ellington in which hesays, “Oh but I have such a strong inXuence by the music of the people—thepeople! that’s the better word, the people rather than my people, because thepeople are my people.” See A Duke Named Ellington, dir. Terry Carter, perf.Duke Ellington, Clark Terry, Russell Procope, Ben Webster, Council for Posi-tive Images and American Masters/WNET, 1988. See also the cogent and infor-mative analysis of Ellington’s use of the phrase “my people” and of his 1963review/musical My People in Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future andRevisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 114–18.

3. Freud, An Outline, 18.4. Ibid., 18–19.5. Ibid., 19.6. See Andrew Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy: A New

Theory of Words (New York: Routledge, 1989).7. See Freud, An Outline, 19.8. Ibid., 20–21.9. Ibid., 19.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 – 261

10. Ibid., 21.11. Quoted in David Leeming, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 112.12. Antonin Artaud, “Artaud the Mômo,” in WatchWends & Rack Screams:

Works from the Final Period, ed. and trans. Clayton Eshleman with BernardBudor (Boston: Exact Change, 1995), 161.

13. Billy Strayhorn, “Lush Life.” Tempo Music, 1936.14. I make this assertion by way of Randy Martin’s brilliant work in

Critical Moves (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998). On pp. 205–6 hewrites: “By extending a productionist model to domains not generally associatedwith an economy oriented toward exchange, I want to take seriously Marx’sunderstanding of capitalism. He treats it as forcibly constituting, by the veryorganizing boundaries it erects and then transgresses, in pursuit of increasingmagnitudes of surplus, the global collectivity, the ‘combination, due to asso-ciation,’ that he understood as the socialization of labor. The extension ofMarx’s concept of socialization to a widening range of practices deepens ratherthan detracts from the power and aims of his analysis. To take the productionof surplus seriously in these other domains should not reduce practices to mereinstruments of the ends of domination where race, gender, or sexuality are inturn nothing more than products in a proWt-taking market. Rather, the empha-sis on surplus identiWes what is productive in race, gender, and sexuality suchthat the proprietary claims of the dominant position in each system are exposedas emerging only through what dominance subordinates through appropriation.The unacknowledged dependence recurs along different dimensions of domi-nance on what it subordinates through appropriation. This dependency of thedominant is one reason that whiteness is both the hatred of and the desire forblackness, that misogyny aspires to the rape and the reverence of the feminine,and that homophobia is the rejection of sameness and the need for it. In short,the appropriation not only produces the divide between dominance and subal-ternity but also the demand for further appropriation as a very condition ofsocial reproduction. That race, class, gender, and sexuality, as the very materi-ality of social identity, are also produced in the process indicates the practicalgenerativity—the ongoing social capacity to render life as history—necessaryfor any cultural product. Therefore, it is not that a productionist approachassigns race, class, gender, and sexuality the same history, political effects, orpractical means. Instead, this approach is intended to imagine the context for

262 – NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

critical analysis that would grant these four articulating structures historicity,politics, and practice in relation to one another, that is, in a manner that ismutually recognizable.

“To speak of practices rather than objects of knowledge as what disciplinesserve privileges the capacity for production over the already given product-object as a founding epistemological premise. The focus on practices also allowsproduction to be named historically so as to situate it with respect to existingpolitical mobilizations. If the older set of disciplinary formations constantly hadto ask, “Knowledge for what?” it was because the autonomy of knowledge fromother social relations was assumed. The practices of cultural studies imply com-mitments that are constitutional to knowledge as such and can therefore be usedto ask how one set of practices could be articulated with another.”

I would brieXy add a couple of small formulations:• The epistemological shift that Marx allows, wherein practices are thought

as if for the Wrst time, as if in eclipse of objects, can itself be thought asan irruption of or into the sciences of value. The black avant-garde is ananticipatory manifestation of that shift/irruption.

• The black avant-garde works the second “as if” above in a speciWc way.The eclipse of objects by practices is a head, a necessary opening that van-ishes here in the work of those who are not but nothing other than objectsthemselves. (Black) performance is the resistance of the object and theobject is in that it resists, is in that it is always the practice of resistance.And if we understand race, class, gender, and sexuality as the materialityof social identity, as the surplus effect (and cause) of production, then wecan also understand the ongoing, resistive force of such materiality as itplays itself out in/as the work of art. This is to say that these four articu-lating structures must be granted not only historicity, politics, and prac-tice, but aesthesis as well. This is also to say that the concept of the objectof performance studies is (in) practice precisely at the convergence of thesurplus (in all the richness with which Martin formulates it—as, in short,the ongoing possibility or hope of a minoritarian insurgence that wouldbe keyed to Deleuze and Guattari, on the one hand, and, say, AdrianPiper, on the other) and the aesthetic.15. This paraphrases remarks of his given at a meeting of the Ford

Foundation Jazz Study Group at Columbia University in 1999.16. In an essay called “The Five Avant-Gardes Or . . . Or None,” in The


Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, ed. Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (NewYork: Routledge, 1996), 308–25.

17. Leeming and, in Strayhorn’s case, David Hajdu. See Hajdu’s LushLife: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (New York: North Point Press, 1996).

18. Leeming, Amazing Grace, 169.19. Ibid., 15120. Ibid., 12–13.21. Ibid., 157.22. Ibid., 143.23. Check his own version of the song—he accompanies his voice on

piano, but there is already an interior accompaniment of the voice—recordedlive at Basin Street East, New York City, and released as Billy Strayhorn, “LushLife,” rec. 14 January 1964, Lush Life, Red Baron, 1992.

24. Artaud, “Ci-git/Here Lies,” WatchWends & Rack Screams, 211.25. Strayhorn, “Lush Life.”26. I mean to place in some sort of resonant relation to one another the

following texts: Neil Smith, Besty Duncan, and Laura Reid, “From Disinvest-ment to Reinvestment: Mapping the Urban ‘Frontier’ in the Lower East Side,”in From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York’s Lower East Side, ed.Janet L. Abu-Lughod et al. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1994), 149–67;Susan Howe, “Incloser,” in The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in Ameri-can Literary History (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993),43–86; and Marcia B. Siegel, At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance (NewYork: Saturday Review Press, 1972).

27. If this were ever sounded, I wouldn’t want the appearance of thecut to be marked by another voice. Just another voicing: which would not bereducible to a difference of voices; which would be marked only by the palpa-bility of the cut—no glance, no sound outside, just a pause and don’t stopthe tape recorder. The question remains: whether and how to mark (visually,spatially, in the absence of sound, the sound in my head) digression, citation,extension, improvisation in the kind of writing that has no name other than“literary criticism.”

28. Cecil Taylor, Chinampas, rec. 16 November 1987, Leo, 1991. I’mgoing to write (about) the piece’s Wrst section.

29. In the absence of reading, either or both of these terms might be justas reducible or virtual as word or sentence. Part of what I’d like to relate is the


way Taylor’s (work art ritual performance music poetry), the way that which is ofTaylor, renders all of these terms unavailable. Nevertheless, I must retain them,at least for a minute, otherwise I Can’t Get Started.

30. “Editors Note,” Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose, ed. ArtLange and Nathaniel Mackey (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1993), x.

31. Or, more precisely, the double absence: the disappearance of the per-formance that is not recorded; the loss of what the recording reduces or occludesby embodying an illusory determinacy and representativeness.

32. Implied here is that glow, aura, sfumato, hazy luminescence thatsmears the edge, the containment, of the image or the letter. Halogen, neon, LasVegas—though I’m pretty sure Taylor’s never played my home town—are inmy head along with another, more recent, recording of Taylor’s, In Florescence,rec. 8 June and 9 September, 1989, A & M, 1990.

33. Or, more precisely, a double phrasing: words’ syntagmic orderingand the arrangement and enactment of their internal sonic resources.

34. Wilson Harris, “History, Fable, and Myth in the Caribbean andGuianas,” in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The UnWnished Genesis of the Imagi-nation, ed. A. J. M. Bundy (London: Routledge, 1999), 157.

35. Gracefully designed by Mike Bennion.36. Spencer Richards, liner notes, Cecil Taylor, Live in Vienna, Leo,

1988. These notes consist largely of an interview with Taylor. The recording isof a performance by the Cecil Taylor Unit given on 7 November 1987, just ninedays before the recording of Chinampas. Richards dates his notes May 1988.

37. “Idiom” demands a break. It demands some extended quotation, Wrstfrom The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), then from Der-rida, “Onto-theology of National Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis),”Oxford Literary Review 14 (1992): 3–23. Idiom, according to the OED: “pecu-liarity, property, peculiar phraseology”; “the form of speech peculiar or properto a people or country”; “the variety of a language which is peculiar to a limiteddistrict or class of people”; “the speciWc character, property, or genius of any lan-guage”; “a peculiarity of phraseology approved by the usage of a language and havinga signiWcation other than its grammatical or logical one” (my emphasis). Idiom,according to Derrida: “I shall say simply of this word ‘idiom,’ that I have justvery rapidly thrust forward, that for the moment I am not restricting it to itslinguistic, discursive circumscription, although, as you know, usage generallyfolds it back towards that limit—idiom as linguistic idiom. For the moment, while


keeping my eye Wxed especially on this linguistic determination which is not all there isto idiom, but which is not just one determination of it among others, I shall be taking‘idiom’ in a much more indeterminate sense, that of prop(ri)e(r)ty, singular feature, inprinciple inimitable and inexpropriable. The idiom is the proper” (my emphasis). Letme add a couple of propositions to which I’ll return: race (“a peculiar or char-acteristic style or manner—liveliness, sprightliness or piquancy,” according tothe OED) and idiom, in their determination by a conceptual apparatus made upof uninterrogated differences, classes, and sets, are interchangeable; t(race) andphrase constitute an improvisation of race and idiom, one activated within acertain understanding of totality or ensemble in which idiom is deWned as thet(race) of a general idiom that is nothing other than the generativity (i.e., whatis produced by and is the possibility of the production) of idiom.

38. Richards, liner notes, Live in Vienna.39. Ibid.40. Ibid.41. Or, more precisely, doubly illegible words: the sonic/visual blurring

of the words; the fundamental absence of the written text. And note the echo ofBaraka’s oft-repeated claim that poetry is “speech musicked.” The particularmanifestation of the phrase to which I refer is quoted in D. H. Melhem, “AmiriBaraka: Revolutionary Traditions: Interview,” Heroism in the New Black Poetry(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), 221.

42. Richards, liner notes, Live in Vienna.43. Derrida, “Onto-theology of National Humanism,” 3.44. Cecil Taylor, “Sound Structure of Subculture Becoming Major

Breath/Naked Fire Gesture,” liner notes, Unit Structures, LP 84237. Blue Note,1966.

45. David Parkin, “Ritual as Spatial Direction and Bodily Division,” inUnderstanding Rituals, ed. Daniel de Coppet (London: Routledge, 1992), 18.

46. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, trans. MoniqueLayton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 66; and quoted in Parkin,“Ritual as Spatial Direction,” 11.

47. Parkin, “Ritual as Spatial Direction,” 16.48. Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Introduction: Writing and Recording Knowl-

edge,” in Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and theAndes, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo (Durham, N.C.: DukeUniversity Press, 1994), 15.


49. On metavoice, see Mackey, “Cante Moro,” Sound States: InnovativePoetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1997), 194–212.

50. See Joanne Rappaport, “Object and Alphabet: Andean Indians andDocuments in the Colonial Period,” in Writing without Words, 284.

51. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the HumanSciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1978), 278–80.

52. See Taylor’s comments on Bill Evans in Nat Hentoff, liner notes,Cecil Taylor, Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come, FLP 40106 LP, Arista/Free-dom, 1975. First published in Down Beat, 25 February 1965, 16–18.

53. Quoted in Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 287. 54. Ibid.55. Parkin, “Ritual as Spatial Direction,” 16.56. See James A. Winn, “Music and Poetry,” in New Princeton Encyclopedia

of Poetry and Poetics, 3d ed., ed. Alex Preminger, T. V. F. Bogan, et al. (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 803. Please take note that this entry inthis deWnitive encyclopedia says very close to nothing about the life and shapeof the synthesis of music and poetry in the “New World” or in non-Westernsocieties. Taylor’s concern with precisely these registers is certainly a constitu-tive feature of his improvisation through the determinations of the dominantunderstanding of that synthesis. In his work the trace of mousike, the ghostlyaffect and effect of a certain free mode of organization, gives us to imagine athought not grounded in the architectonics and dynamics of difference thatharmony both marks and conceals. It’s as if the real/phantasmatic duality of theencounter with the other opens that which demands an improvisation throughthe condition of its possibility.

57. See back cover of Taylor, Chinampas.58. Check the sentence (in Lange and Mackey, “Editors Note,” Moment’s

Notice, x) that follows Charles Lloyd’s expression of doubt concerning the capa-bility of words to arrive at music: “Writers inXuenced by jazz have been vari-ously rising to the challenge of proving him wrong.”

59. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1990), 6–7.60. Ibid., 8–9.61. Ibid., 9–11.62. Ibid., 12.


63. Derrida, “Onto-theology of National Humanism” 3–23.64. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University

Press, 1993), 8–11.65. And the break or cut was always thus. Armstrong disseminates the

break—that’s what we hear in “Black and Blue” and, even more iconically, in“West End Blues.” The break animates the entirety of the solo rather thansimply functioning as the “home” of something that approaches the solo, somelocal and locatable habitation (of the name). This is what jazz comes to, thisdissemination of the break. Such jouissance, which we’ll come to see as the ani-mation—the essence and historicity—of an invaginative tradition of joy andpain, is just that nonlocalizable dis/continuity. The new thing in jazz was inArmstrong already—this is the old-new thing.

66. Or, as in Amiri Baraka’s “The Burton Greene Affair,” where the irre-ducibly antinatal occasion of the homoerotics of hybridity is embodied in thepunctual and unfruitful playing of Green (and the specter of Cecil Taylor-as-inXuence). Or, as in the sad embrace of Ray and Jimmy at the end of Baraka’sThe Toilet. Is it new? The danger of national emasculation is embedded in thehomoerotics of the aphorism. Again, the sexual cut is an evasion of the natal.We’ll return to these last two examples.

67. And part of what’s at stake here, in this re-en-gendering sexual cut,this lackness (sorry: blackness) of blackness into which we’ve fallen, is, again,a performative queerness where originary maternity and the hypermasculineare given as convergent Wgures of a kind of degradation that has liberation atits heart. This thing at the center is unreachable for Ellison precisely becausethe language that would give us access to it is broken or unavailable. But, asSedgwick writes, “That’s one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to: the openmesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses andexcess of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’ssexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically. The experi-mental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures attach-ing to the very many of us who may at times be moved to describe ourselves as(among many other possibilities) pushy femmes, radical faeries, fantasists, drags.Clones, leatherfolk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, mas-turbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! Queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, trans-sexuals, aunties, wannabees, lesbian-identiWed men or lesbians who sleep withmen, or . . . people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such.” Sedgwick


goes on to acknowledge “intellectuals and artists of color . . . [who] are usingthe leverage of ‘queer’ to do a new kind of justice to the fractal intricacies oflanguage, skin, migration, state. Thereby, the gravity (I mean the gravitas, themeaning, but also the center of gravity) of the term ‘queer’ itself deepens andshifts.” I want to move in the trajectory of this shifting sound in order to rangeas much as possible across the entirety of the experimental Weld of blacknessthat it opens. This is after a sounding and resounding of the sound of the blackavant-garde and its political, theoretical, aesthetic erotics that is given only inthe sexual cut. See Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8–9.

68. Baraka, “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS,” in The Dead Lecturer(New York: Grove Press, 1964), 61–64.

69. Ellison, Invisible Man, 564.70. Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook, 34.71. Ibid. 34.72. Ibid.73. Taylor, “Sound Structure.”74. Baraka, “New Black Music: A Concert in BeneWt of the Black Arts

Repertory Theatre/School Live,” in Black Music (New York: William Morrow,1967), 176.

75. Derrida, The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1987), 500–502. This quotation is from a section of The PostCard called “Du Tout.” That section is introduced in the following manner:“First published in Confrontation I (1978), preceded by this editorial note: ‘On21 November 1977, a session of “Confrontation” with Jacques Derrida wasorganized around [Derridean] texts in thematic relation to the theory, move-ment, and institution of psychoanalysis. . . . In response to René Major’s initialquestions, Jacques Derrida advanced several introductory propositions. We arereproducing them here in the literality of their recording. Only the title is anexception to this rule.’” Note the small phrase that accompanies Derrida is: Ce-n’est-pas-du-tout-une-tranche. Bass offers the following translator’s note: “Thissentence plays on lexical and syntactic undecidability. Une tranche is the usualFrench word for a slice, as in a slice of cake, from the verb trancher, to slice. InFrench psychoanalysis slang, une tranche is also the period of time one spendswith a given analyst. There is no equivalent English expression. Further, theexpression du tout can mean either ‘of the whole’ or ‘at all.’ Thus, the sentencecan mean ‘This is not a “slice” [a piece, in the analytic sense or not] of the


whole,’ or ‘This is not at all a “slice” [in any sense].’ The verb trancher can alsomean to decide on a question or to resolve in a clear-cut way; the English ‘tren-chant’ has a similar sense. Throughout this interview, the sense of tranche and‘trench’ beckon toward each other, Wnally coming together in the concludingdiscussion of schisms and seisms (earthquakes, cracking ground).” I can’t dis-cuss, here, the interview in its entirety; but the thematics of the slice or cut, ofshifting or cracked ground, of their relation to and constitution of the whole, isat the heart of this project, all of which is scored by these motives.

76. Derrida, “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interviewwith Jacques Derrida,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York:Routledge, 1992), 35.

77. Derrida, “An Interview with Derrida,” trans. David Allison et al., inDerrida and Différance, eds. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston, Ill.:Northwestern University Press, 1988), 73–74.

78. Derrida, “The Original Discussion of Différance,” trans. David Wood,Sarah Richmond, and Malcolm Bernard, in Derrida and Différance, eds. Woodand Bernasconi, 87.

79. Is it a “Derridean hope,” an echo or reformulation or deconstructionof the Heideggerian hope to which Derrida alludes in Différance? Or is it other-wise? Is it of the cultures, of Algeria and elsewhere, marked by more than whatwould always have been the origin? See Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans.Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 27.

80. Derrida, Memoires: For Paul de Man, rev. ed., trans. Cecile Lindsay,Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf, Wellek Library Lecturesat the University of California, Irvine (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UniversityPress), 221. This is part of Derrida’s Wrst public response to the discovery of deMan’s wartime journalism.

81. There is another Derridean cut that has been operative here all along,or at least since the invocation of (Artaud’s) voices/forces. In 1965, toward theend of “La Parole SoufXée,” Derrida asks: “Liberated from diction, withdrawnfrom the dictatorship of the text, will not theatrical atheism be given over to im-provisational anarchy and to the actors’ capricious inspirations? Is not anotherform of subjugation in preparation?” The Wnal question sounds differently,bears an alternative stress, after and of the whole. There is another form of sub-jugation in preparation and so we come, with foresight, unprepared but adornedwith a phrase, a sound. Perhaps another way of thinking magic and black magic,


a magic disidentiWcation in which the scene of hasty and deliberate—improvi-sational—objection irrupts into doubled theatricality as an artist or actor whoembodies the process of making art or making acts in order to recalibrate thisconstellation: madness and its other; the work and its absence; subjugationand its improvisation. We’ll return to these questions by way of Adrian Piperwho is concerned, as in Artaud according to Derrida, with the discovery of “auniversal grammar of cruelty.” See Derrida, “La Parole SoufXée,” Writing andDifference, 169–195. The quotations above are from 190 and 191.

82. Nat Hentoff, liner notes, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, LP9005, Candid, 1960.

83. Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 84–85.

84. Jaki Byard, interview with Ingrid Monson, Saying Something, 179.85. Nathaniel Mackey, Atet A.D. (San Francisco: City Lights Books,

2001), 118–19.86. Eric Dolphy, remarks at the conclusion of “Miss Ann,” rec. 2 June

1964, Last Date, Fontana, 1991.87. Douglass, Narrative, 263.

2. In the Break

1. The question of the name is unavoidable. It is bound to the questionof where radicalism goes, or how radicalism develops, in Baraka’s work after theseizure/opening of 1962–1966 upon which my study of him has been concen-trated. Why refer to the author in question now as Baraka even though his textsof the period here examined appear under the name LeRoi Jones? In part tohonor the nominative marker of his own conception of his radicalism, to indi-cate that what was radical in the moment examined did not disappear butwas transformed and continues to transform into new Barakan Wgurations thathave both attenuated and ampliWed the tradition they inhabit. But it is also toindicate, along with Lula—the embodiment of predatory white femininity inBaraka’s play Dutchman—that talking to and with and about somebody’s nameain’t the same as talking to/with/about them. Taking Lula as a model is, ofcourse, problematic, but how she works here and in the scene Dutchman is anddelineates could never be absolutely separated from how Bessie Smith, say, (orLady Day) or Bird, could or will work here and in that scene whose tracedemands excavation. If the radical scene of that moment were underground and


moving, like a train, traversed and scarred by racial, sexual, and class differenceand desire, where is the location of that scene now? How do we reenact thatsubmergence in the interest of a more authentic upheaval? How do we avoid theperennial call of a performed oppositional purity? And these questions, imply-ing as they do that the long seizure that I investigate is the scene of Baraka’sradicalism at its opening and at a level of intensity that would never be sur-passed, are not reducible to the assertion that bohemianism or interracialismor homoeroticism are that radicalism’s very constitution. Rather, it is in theensemble that they rupture and exceed that the radicalism, which is also to say theblackness, of Baraka in/and the tradition, is anarchically grounded.

2. Baraka, “Apple Cores #6,” in Black Music (New York: WilliamMorrow, 1967), 142.

3. See Martin Heidegger, “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: The SpiegelInterview (1966),” trans. William J. Richardson, S.J., in Heidegger: The Man andthe Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981).

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K.Odgen (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 65.

5. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology II/ Bemerkungenüber die Philosophie der Psychologie II, ed. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 2e, 89e.

6. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology I/ Bemerkungenüber die Philosophie der Psychologie I, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. vonWright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1980), 6e.

7. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2d ed., trans. G. E. M.Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 193e. Quoted in Stephen Mul-hall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (NewYork: Routledge, 1990), 6.

8. Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology I: PreliminaryStudies for Part II of Philosophical Investigations/Letzte Schriften über die Philosophieder Psychologie I: Vorstudien zum zweiten Teil der Philosophiche Unterschungen, ed.G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992), 100e.

9. Derrida, “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interviewwith Jacques Derrida,” 65.


10. See Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Icon, Index, and Symbol,” In Col-lected Papers, vol. 2: Elements of Logic, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931).

11. Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger onSeeing Aspects (New York: Routledge), 11.

12. Peirce, “One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories of Thought andNature,” in Peirce on Signs, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press), 181.

13. The tragic life produces, is produced by, the one for whom we alwaysmourn, the one who is most acutely recognizable in mourning. One mournsfor itself: singularity and totality, effects of a determining nascence, are neverpresent, never moved from or arrived at through whatever possible nostalgicdirection. Miles is their effect; his tone is tragic, mournful; we mourn for him,and in so doing, long to reproduce that tone, which exists, as his voices, as thetrace of a singularity and a totality that never were. In mourning Miles wemourn the mournful trace of what never was. More later.

14. Baraka, “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS,” 63.15. Ibid., 61.16. Cool, here, is the fullness with which Baraka enacts Charles Olson’s

famous dicta from “Projective Verse”: “Form is never more than an extensionof content”; “The HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE/the HEART,by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.” See Olson, “Projective Verse,” inSelected Writings (New York: New Directions, 1966), 19.

17. Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology I, 65e, quotedin Mulhall, On Being in the World, 11.

18. See Baraka, “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS,” 73, and note the Wnallines of the poem: “may a lost god damballah, rest or save us/against the mur-ders we intend/against his lost white children/black dada nihilismus.” Note,too, the anticipation of Heidegger, “Only a God.”

19. Mackey on Baraka: “The way in which Baraka’s poems of this period[the period referred to is the early sixties when Baraka wrote “BLACK DADANIHILISMUS” as well as “History as Process,” the poem that occasions Mackey’scomments: FM] move intimates fugitive spirit, as does much of the music that hewas into. I recall him writing of a solo by saxophonist John Tchicai on an ArchieShepp album: ‘it slides away from the proposed.’” See Mackey, “Cante Moro” 200.


20. What I’m after here is the properly metaphysical faith in the consti-tutive absence at metaphysics’ very heart: the ensemble metaphysics spurns andcraves as totality is obscured by singularity, its name(s), its trace(s), and vice versa.

21. Ekkehard Jost, Free Jazz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1981), 21.22. See Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York:

Penguin Books, 1990).23. It has also been called, by William J. Harris, his transitional period,

the period in which he moves from bohemianism to Black Nationalism [social-structural dynamics paralleled by the movement from bebop to free jazz dis-cussed above], from one kind of political despair to another. See WilliamHarris’s editorial arrangement of The Jones/Baraka Reader (New York: Thunder’sMouth Press, 1999).

24. John R. Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1983), 143.

25. See Mackey, “Cante Moro.”26. Baraka, “When Miles Split,” The Village Voice, 15 October 1991, 87.27. Leon Forrest, “A Solo Long-Song: For Lady Day,” Relocations of the

Spirit (WakeWeld, R.I.: Asphodel Press/Moyer Bell, 1994), 344–95. See espe-cially 344–55.

28. Billie Holiday with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (New York:Penguin Books, 1992), 104–5.

29. The performance was recorded on 10 November 1956, issued later asThe Essential Billie Holiday, Verve V6-8410.

30. Forrest, “A Solo Long-Song,” 344.31. Forrest quoting Finis Henderson in “A Solo Long-Song,” 356.32. Forrest, “A Solo Long-Song,” 345.33. Holiday with Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 5.34. Undated letter to William and Maely Dufty, quoted in Donald Clarke,

Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday (New York: PenguinBooks, 1994), 399.

35. Holiday with Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues, 192.36. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1986), 5.37. Ibid., 16–17. We’ll see how Baraka insists upon something Monk

names and performs with sublime, oxymoronic precision. Check him at the


piano, machine gun over his shoulder, on the cover of an album entitled Under-ground that includes his composition “Ugly Beauty.” Or, back to the subject athand, and along lines that we’ll see Baraka begin to work out, listen to Ladysinging “You’ve Changed”: more later.

38. Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, 15.39. See William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. with analytical

commentary by Stephen Booth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,1977), 387–92.

40. Derrida, “This Strange Institution,” 67.41. Derrida speaks elsewhere (see Derrida, “Politics and Friendship: An

Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in The Althusserian Legacy, ed. E. Ann Kaplanand Michael Sprinker [London: Verso, 1993], 226) of deconstruction as justsuch an everything, the “open and nonself-identical totality of the world.” Thisfragment of the Derridean discourse on totality shows something of another—both descriptive and prescriptive—awareness of the whole as wholly restruc-tured by and in that ongoing event at the intersection of invagination andimprovisation that is, who is, nothing other than the Dark Lady. This is so inspite of, and sometimes quite clearly at the precise moment of his statementsof, his reticence toward improvisation, which is why formulations of Derridasuch as the one above are more fully experienced when broken and expanded bywhatever version you happen to have of “Billie’s Blues” (sometimes she sings,“I’ll quit my man”; sometimes she sings, “I’ll cut my man”).

42. See Laurel Brinton, “The Iconic Role of Aspect in Shakespeare’sSonnet 129” (Poetics Today 6, no. 3 [1985]: 447–59), for a more detailed exposi-tion of certain aspects of these matters.

43. Booth reminds us that for the Elizabethans “sonnet” could refer toany short lyric, even the six iambic couplets that make up number 126. Boothalso points out that the last of those couplets refers to and enacts a “quietus,”cessation or cut that the thematics of the entire poem puts forward as theunavoidable shadow of a temporality, embodied in the young man, which seemsto resist the End. The oneness of growth and decay never achieves the equilib-rium of a pause; such a pause would only be precisely that end that it desires toavoid. “Having” would be precisely this stasis that is not one, but it and its rep-resentation are impossible. Left hanging, out of time in a cut that reallyisn’t there, we move to another accounting or encountering, the arhythmics


and thematics of blackness that takes the sequence out. Here are sonnets 126and 127 (Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 108–11):

O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy pow’rDost hold time’s Wckle glass, his sickle-hour,Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow’st–If nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back,She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skillMay time disgrace, and wretched minute kill.Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure;She may detain but not still keep her treasure.Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,And her quietus is to render thee.

In the old age black was not counted fair,Or if it were it bore not beauty’s name.But now is black beauty’s successive heir,And beauty slandered with a bastard shame; For since each hand hath put in nature’s pow’r,Fairing the foul with art’s false borrowed face,Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bow’rBut is profaned, if not lives in disgraceTherefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black,Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seemAt such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,Sland’ring creation with a false esteem.

Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe,That every tongue says beauty should look so.

44. These are fairly faithful variations on entries found under “race” inThe Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1, 1971 edition.

45. Baraka, “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” in Black Music, 25.46. D. H. Melhem, “Amiri Baraka: Revolutionary Traditions: Interview,”

in Heroism in the New Black Poetry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,1990), 257.


47. Annette Michelson, “The Wings of Hypothesis: Montage and theTheory of the Interval,” in Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942, ed. MatthewTeitelbaum (Cambridge: MIT Press), 67–68.

48. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Framer Framed (New York: Routledge, 1992), 120.49. See Sergei Eisenstein, “The Filmic Fourth Dimension,” in Film

Form, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 64–71.50. Baraka, “Apple Cores #5—The Burton Greene Affair,” in Black

Music, 136.51. I’m saying that Baraka is part of a long line of what he disparagingly

calls “Negro deconstructors”—Du Bois is that tradition’s capstone, a precur-sor and anticipatory critic of Gates and Baker, ones who are, paradoxically,anathema to Baraka in that they might be said to arrest rather than extend thattradition.

52. See Baraka, “Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall,” in Home,173–78.

53. See Mackey, “Cante Moro,” for more on such stammers and divisions.54. Heidegger, “Only a God,” 56–57.55. Baraka, “New Black Music,” 175.56. Heidegger, “Only a God,” 57.57. Jost, Free Jazz, 94.58. Ibid., 95.59. Derrida, Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1991), 22.60. Derrida, “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,”

trans. Ruben Berezdivin, Research in Phenomenology 13: 65–83.61. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and

Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).62. Heidegger, Being and Time, quoted in Derrida, “Geschlecht,” 69.63. Derrida, “Geschlecht,” 71–72.64. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett

(New York: Grove Press, 1965), 22.65. Derrida, Cinders, 25.66. Ibid., 21.67. Baraka, “Home,” in Home, 10.68. See Theodore Hudson, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka (Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press, 1973).69. Johannes Koenig is the signature afWxed to “Names and Bodies,” a


brief text that opens the possibility of a brief and partial tracing of Baraka’s turnsand declensions—from white bohemianism and aestheticism to black culturalnationalism; from subjectivist to socialist; from the aesthetico-philosophical tothe historico-political—and that forces us to ask if these parallel certain turnsof Heidegger: for instance, from the attempt to deWne Being in terms of manand within a historico-structural hermeneutic to an attempt to deWne Being interms of a linguistic event and a topology (thus a turn away from subjectivism).How is Baraka’s awareness of this turn to be read—as an “anti-humanism,” areading through anthropocentrism that parallels the effort to determine “thehighest form of Being” in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics? The ques-tion, Wnally, is of the status of Baraka’s reading of Heidegger—of, for instance,Heideggerian Dasein:

IfLife an abstract noun, living (Life-ing) is not (i.e., it is living.)

Be (I think Olson sd its root from the sanscrit Seen or Being seen)And it is Verb. The Act.Doing. Seeing. Being.Seinde. (Heidegger’s Being. & its Projection

or what he called Dasein Da-Sein, Sein is To Be. Da isliterally There. To Be There. Or the positing of an existence that isnot literally where we are now. The colloquial mean-ing) Whereyou are. Now.(Also colloquial) Where you at? Or. where areyou at? An existence(tial) question. What is the disposition ofyour Life (forces), &c?

See Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka, The Floating Bear: A Newsletter (La Jolla,Calif.: Laurence McGilvery, 1973), 271.

70. This group of words, which I reluctantly call a sentence only becauseI can then, by way of a certain principle of expansion, think of it anacrustically,as an opening of an improvisation of rhythm, is also the opening of both a con-vergence and divergence with Kristeva. Indeed, it is her notion of expansion,employed in “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” that I appeal to above, just as it isher distinction between sentence and phrase—also given in “Word, Dialogue,and Novel” and elaborated in “The Novel as Polylogue” (Julia Kristeva, Desirein Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans.


Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 1980], 64–91, 159–209)—which I both invoke and seek to critiqueand transform. I do not intend to fulWll the imperatives of a Kristevan rigor, onethat would, for instance, require a certain “nonexclusive opposition” betweensentence and phrase, reason and instinctual drive; to do so would require asubmission to the rigors of the sentence that I would here neither movethrough nor forget but improvise in the name of what lies before it. Neverthe-less, Kristeva’s work is crucial to what I am attempting here, not only becauseof her original movement within a conceptual Weld I must now negotiate, onecharacterized by a certain understanding of music that remains to be worked,but also because of her understanding of the relations between that conceptualWeld and sexual difference.

71. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, trans. Anthony Kenny(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 97.

72. Merrill B. Hintikka and Jaakko Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 155. See also Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks,ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1975), 119.

73. Nor is the question of what it means for the performance of blacknessto be done through spirit, breath, and against rhythm lost. We’ll return to this.

74. Heidegger, “Kant’s Thesis about Being,” trans. Ted E. Klein andWilliam E. Pohl, Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 4, 10–11.

75. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology,trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 6.

76. Derrida, “Différance,” 27.77. Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Out-

side,” in Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mehlman (NewYork: Zone Books, 1987), 54.

78. Baraka, “The Burton Greene Affair,” 138–39.79. Derrida, Of Spirit, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28.80. According to Baraka, Burton Greene’s style is pointed toward Taylor.

On the other hand, if we extrapolate to Brown from Jones’s description ofSanders, the saxophonists want “to feel the East, as . . . oriental m[e]n.” SeeBaraka, “The Burton Greene Affair,” 137.

81. See Andrew Ross, “Hip and the Long Front of Color” in No Respect:


Intellectuals in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 65–101, and SallyBanes, Greenwich Village, 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).

82. Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died,” The Collected Poems of FrankO’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 325.

83. Andrew Ross, “Hip and the Long Front,” 66. 84. Baraka, “American Sexual Reference: Black Male,” Home: Social

Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966), 216–33.85. Ross, “Hip and the Long Front,” 66–67.86. Ibid., 241, n. 4.87. See Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New

York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 334, and take note of the intensity with whichBaraka was the object of consumptive hipster desire. See also Hettie Jones, HowI Became Hettie Jones (New York: Penguin, 1990).

88. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fic-tion Writing in the East Village, 1957–1965 (New York: Plume, 1988), 110.

89. Ibid., 113.90. Ibid.91. Ibid., 115.92. Ibid., 173.93. Ibid., 174.94. Ibid.95. Joan W. Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed.

Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 22–40.96. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Supplementing Marxism,” in Whither

Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective, ed. Bernd Magnus andStephen Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 1995), 117.

97. Catherine Clément, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, trans. SallyO’Driscoll and Deirdre M. Mahoney (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1994), 1.

98. Ibid., 1–2.99. Baraka, The Toilet, in From the Other Side of the Century II: A New

American Drama, 1960–1995, ed. Douglass Messerli and Mac Wellman (LosAngeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1998), 126.

100. Ibid., 128.101. Ibid.


102. That question of development that the changing name (LeRoi Jones,Amiri Baraka; Foots, Ray) or same indexes and that must be recalibrated bythinking it through the Wgure and Wssure of montage recurs throughoutBaraka’s work. The Toilet is no exception. What does montage do to develop-ment? How does montage reconWgure advent? These questions are themselvestied not only to an investigation of the relation between all of the well-knownplays Baraka produced in 1964—The Toilet, The Slave, and Dutchman—but alsoto what we might call the development of his own critical attitude toward TheToilet in its relation to the other plays of this “trilogy” and to his work as awhole. There is, sufWce it to say, an interesting temporal dynamic in his dis-course regarding The Toilet. In discussions of the play at or around the time ofits initial production, Baraka speaks of it as emerging from the memory-drivenfrenzy of a single all-night’s writing, a kind of jet-propelled radiophonic zoomclash given in one sitting. Later, the play’s ending is Wgured as a tacked-on sen-timentalism that does not much more than mark Baraka’s temporary occupationof a transitional phase (read the speciWc combination of immaturity and degra-dation that becomes, for him, his particular bohemianism and bohemianismin general), a moment remarkable mainly in that it signiWes both developmentand a certain arrest of development. I’m concerned with valorizing and inves-tigating the political erotics of such arrest, cessation, break, syncope, as itanimates Baraka’s work and tradition. This is not to denigrate or undermine thevalue of development but to think its montagic interinanimation with suchmoments of disruptive, interruptive intensity. I want to linger, with and againstBaraka, in this music.

Another, necessarily condensed and therefore inadequate way to put it isthis: one condition of possibility of black arts is bohemianism, is the rejectionof bohemianism; the limits of black arts are set by the rejection of a certainrevolutionary embrace that is embedded in bohemianism, and the possibility oftheir transgression is given in the rejection of a certain retrogressive privilegethat bohemianism retains and that is manifest in and at its hip and unhip poles.There are questions here concerning decadence or deviance. The black artsare, in part, the cultural vehicle of return to a certain moral fundamentalism,one based on (the desire for) African tradition rather than white/bourgeoisnormativity. This is to say that they would enact a return to the former afterhaving enacted the bohemian rejection of the latter. The embrace of thehomoerotic is, here, an opening and not an aim. And while the embrace of the


homoerotic and the embrace—rather than repression—of the maternal les-son/lesion/mark do not operate in some simple and direct relation, they brushone another in such a way as to make possible the disruption of all manner ofretrograde national symbolisms of markable and marketable maternal soil. Thatearth erupts its own refusal—dark, incontinent, air, fold.

For more on this issue see Nielsen, Black Chant, and Lorenzo Thomas,Extraordinary Measure: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century AmericanPoetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), 118–61. I have onlyglanced off the issue of Baraka’s career trajectory, preferring to focus on oneextended moment. Obviously there is much more to be said, and I hope to saysome of it. The investigation of this issue has been initiated in the followingtexts: Hudson, From Jones to Baraka; Kimberly W. Benston, Baraka: The Renegadeand the Mask (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976); Werner Sollors,Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York:Columbia University Press, 1978); William J. Harris, The Poetry and Poetics ofAmiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,1985). Two recent texts advance this investigation by reversing the priority thepreceding critics give to aesthetics over politics: Komozi Woodard, A Nationwithin a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and Jerry GaWo Watts, AmiriBaraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York Univer-sity Press, 2001).

103. Banes, Greenwich Village, 1963, 154.

3. Visible Music

1. David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt,1994), 34.

2. Lee Edelman, “The Part for the (W)hole,” Homographesis (New York:Routledge, 1994), 68–69.

3. Edelman struggles against the constraints of the hole/whole binarythat, in certain circles, constitutes the range of Wguration for identity: “Canidentity itself be renegotiated in the force Weld where ‘race’ and sexuality are eachinXected by the other’s gravitational Weld? Can it open itself to self-differencewithout being Wgured either as ‘hole’ or ‘whole’?” Leaving aside the question ofwhat is implied by the inverted commas that bracket “race” and the absence ofsuch a mark for “sexuality” (Does the mark indicate constructedness as opposed


to the natural, the fantasmatic as opposed to the real? Can we remain comfort-able with such oppositional formulation?), one is left to consider the possibilitythat for a critical discourse on Baldwin in particular and black performances ingeneral, hole and whole both remain operative even in their sublation. Thatpossibility has already been investigated by Houston Baker, in part by way of aconsideration of Baldwin’s extended critical engagement with Richard Wright:“Transliterated in letters of Afro-America, the black hole assumes the subsurfaceforce of the black underground. It graphs, that is to say, the subterranean holewhere the trickster is ludic. Deconstructivebeing. Further, in the script of Afro-America, the hole is the domain of Wholeness, an achieved relationality of blackcommunity in which desire recollects experience and sends it forth as blues.To be Black and (W)hole is to escape incarcerating restraints of a white world(i.e., a black hole) and to engage the concentrated, underground singularity ofexperience that results in a blues desire’s expressive fullness.” I’ve alreadyattempted to show, by way of Baraka and Delany, that the black underground isa sexual underground, a space re-en-gendering aesthetic and political experi-ment. Edelman’s work helps to emphasize even while it strains to hear the musicthat Baraka speaks. I’ll return to this question of music shortly but wanted topause here to acknowledge Baker’s formative presence as a thinker of “theontological totality” at this point in the proceedings. See Edelman, “The Partfor the (W)hole,” 59; and Baker, “A Dream of American Form: Fictive Dis-course, Black (W)holes, and a Blues Book Most Excellent,” in Blues, Ideology, andAfro-American Literature, 151–52.

4. Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” 55.5. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul

Baines and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 4–5.6. Amiri Baraka, Eulogies (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1996), 98.7. Here is a relevant quote from the title essay of Edelman’s Homo-

graphesis, 9–10: “Following . . . from Derrida’s post-Saussurean characterizationof writing as a system of ‘différance’ that operates without positive terms andendlessly defers the achievement of identity as self-presence, the ‘graphesis,’ theentry into writing, that ‘homographesis’ would hope to specify is not onlyone in which ‘homosexual identity’ is differentially conceptualized by a hetero-sexual culture as something legibly written on the body, but also one in whichthe meaning of ‘homosexual identity’ itself is determined through its assimila-tion to the position of writing within the tradition Western metaphysics. The


‘writing,’ in other words, as which homosexuality historically is construed,names, I will argue, the reduction of ‘différance’ to a question of determinantdifference; from the vantage point of dominant culture it names homosexualityas a secondary, sterile, and parasitic form of social representation that stands inthe same relation to heterosexual identity that writing, in the phonocentricmetaphysics that Derrida traces throughout Western philosophy from Plato toFreud (and beyond), occupies in relation to speech or voice. Yet as the very prin-ciple of differential articulation, ‘writing,’ especially when taken as a gerundthat approximates the meaning of ‘graphesis,’ functions to articulate identityonly in relation to signs that are structured, as Derrida puts it, by their ‘non-self-identity.’ Writing, therefore, though it marks or describes those differencesupon which the speciWcation of identity depends, works simultaneously . . . to‘de-scribe,’ efface, or undo identity by framing difference as the misrecognitionof a ‘différance’ whose negativity, whose purely relational articulation, callsinto question the possibility of any positive presence or discreet identity. Likewriting, then, homographesis would name a double operation: one serving theideological purposes of a conservative social order intent on codifying identitiesin its labor of disciplinary inscription and the other resistant to that categoriza-tion, intent on de-scribing the identities that order has so oppresively in-scribed.”

8. Guattari, Chaosmosis, 7. There he writes: “Grafts of transferenceoperate in this way, not issuing from ready-made dimensions of subjectivitycrystallized into structural complexes, but from a creation which itself indicatesa kind of aesthetic paradigm. One creates new modalities of subjectivity in thesame way that an artist creates new forms from the palette. In such a context,the most heterogeneous components may work towards a patient’s positive evolu-tion: relations with architectural space; economic relations; the co-managementby patient and carer of the different vectors of treatment; taking advantage ofall occasions opening onto the outside world; a processual exploitation of event-centered singularities—everything which can contribute to the creation of anauthentic relation with the other.”

9. Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Princi-ples of Its Power,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W.Norton, 1977), 232.

10. Lacan, “Alienation,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis,ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton,1978), 212.


11. Guattari, Chaosmosis, 5.12. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,”

Écrits, 4.13. Ibid.14. See Harris, “History, Fable, and Myth,” for more on phantom limbs.15. Baraka, Wise, Why’s, Y’s: Djeli Ya (The Griot’s Song) (1–40) (Chicago:

Third World Press, 1995), 7.16. Adorno, “On Jazz,” trans. Jaime Owen Daniel, Discourse 12, no. 1

(fall–winter 1989–90), 53.17. Henry Dumas, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” in Goodbye, Sweetwater:

New and Selected Stories, ed. Eugene B. Redmond (New York: Thunder’s MouthPress, 1988), 85–91.

18. See John Brenkman, “The Other and the One: Psychoanalysis,Reading, the Symposium,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Read-ing: Otherwise, ed. Shoshona Felman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1982), 393–456. Brenkman deals with this in his staging of an encounterbetween Plato and Lacan, philosophy and psychoanalysis. He writes: “This rela-tion between the denial of castration and philosophical discourse acquires aspeciWcally social dimension when viewed from the standpoint of the subject’shistory. It allows us to glimpse how an unconscious formation can, with thehelp of the educational process that intervenes during latency, be Wtted to theexigencies of an existing and ideological order” (444).

19. Edelman, “Homographesis,” 9.20. Brenkman, “The Other and the One,” 444.21. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” 1.22. James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, dir. Karen Thorsen, perf. James

Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Bobby Short, David Baldwin, Nobody Knows Produc-tions, Maysels Films, Inc., 1991.

23. Thorsen, James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket.24. Lacan, “What Is a Picture?” in The Four Fundamental Concepts,

117–18.25. Ibid., 118–19.26. Such anticipation is lacking even though the sound of Lacan’s voice

irrupting into these texts called seminars, seminars called texts, aural in theirprovenance and therefore full of the scandal/chance of the voice’s extensionthrough meaning, song and speech, voice itself to metavoice: this, too, is the


baraka, as it is played in Robert Pete Williams or Rev. Gary Davis, the singingpreachers of whom Baldwin is one and not just one among others. His text is along sermon on the baraka.

27. Presumably here he is speaking of the horn as an object devoid ofinstrumentality and wholly uninXected by its aural function, something movingout toward a certain realm of voice and spirit, a certain interruptive noisinessthat is problematic precisely to the extent that it disturbs the spatial/visualground for this strange occlusionary intersection of woman in sexual differenceand sound in the holoesthetic Weld. What I mean here is that this negationof the aural function of the horn, of the aural possibility of the horn, is boundup with the visual/spatial hegemony that is the condition and condition of pos-sibility of the understanding of the sign and the sign’s relation to sexual differ-ence (and racial difference—though this is not Lacan’s concern) that Lacanworks within. He would like to speak of those innumerable other things whoseappearance is clear, whose appearance is not augmented by sound or sound’spotential, a potential that disturbs the protocols of meaning that the sign, in itsrelation to visualizable difference, imposes and follows.

28. Adorno speaks of the rhythm of the iron system, a hypnotic agentthat puts folks to sleep for the purposes of a fucked-up deception. He therebyforces the question concerning jazz and enlightenment by asserting a necessaryrelation between jazz and enlightenment-as-mass-deception. He moves theoret-ically to foreclose any possible relation between the music and another enlight-enment to be determined neither by rampant instrumental rationality nor anirrationalism that emerges from the instrumentalism it would oppose.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. John Cumming [New York: Contin-uum, 1994]), Adorno and Max Horkheimer suggest that the enlightenmentalways carried the seed of its own reversal. This seed would then have to besuppressed, not allowed to disseminate. Enlightened thought in jazz as jazz—the notion contains the seeds of its own destruction as much as any particularhistorical manifestation. How, then, to protect against the seeds and their dis-semination? By way of a prophylactic gaze, perhaps, or a beneWcent sound,protecting reason on its journey from itself. Here jazz is aligned—as a kindof essence or, as Lacan might put it, “cunning” of reason (an invagination orsexual cut that goes all the way back to Hester(’s scream) and before and enactsthat materialization of the phallus to which Baldwin is especially attuned (again,one thinks of Abbey Lincoln’s “Tryptich”)—both with the seed of reason’s


destruction and, perhaps, the prophylaxis that guards against that destruction.It is a danger and a saving power that works to threaten and protect reason, tosave enlightenment from itself by being more of what it already is. Reason isreason’s seed, its destruction and regeneration. Reason’s seed: reason’s jazz. Theprophylactic sound is what had earlier been thought of as destruction. The seedthat destroys turns out to have been that which protects. That seed or soundbecomes a blessing, maybe Ornette’s. But you have to listen. Strange that thetrue prophylactic allows all that insemination and dissemination, opens every-thing to all that is thought in terms of hybridity and impurity, popularityand deception, all that is signiWed by and in a certain rhythm, a certain (asQueen Latifah might say) gift of body, as jazz, as the new and necessarilyun/successful, ir/rational rhythm method. It wasn’t always just the rhythm ofthe iron system; it was also rhythm in spirit—whatever all of spirit means—against the spirit of system.

Adorno’s reaction is no simple sound-induced seizure; it is tied to a par-ticularly embodied sound, a sound bound up both with what exceeds sound andwith what seems to be excessive in terms of the body, with a certain regression,a tympanic logic of enrapture. This brings us to the question of intoxication andimprovisation and to the relation of intoxication and insemination and how thatmight get us to the place of jazz: how sexual desire and musical rapture bothcontain that which might either endanger or revive reason; how, at the locus ofthe lunatic, the lover, and the poet, another kind of thinking, another enlight-enment might operate. Baldwin is hip to this breaking connection: the sexual-ity of the music, the fact that the music is infused with sexuality and that thatsexuality marks the spot of a double rapture, sexual and musical, a rapture ofintoxication by way of love and sound and an overpowering invasion of body: allof this is there from beginning to end, from Go Tell It on the Mountain to Justabove My Head, from illuminative Wre to heard and not seen evidence.

29. Leeming, James Baldwin, 76.30. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 53.31. Houston A. Baker Jr., “Caliban’s Triple Play,” in “Race,” Writing, and

Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1986), 394. Quoted in Edelman, “The Part for the (W)hole,” 73.

32. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 57.33. James Baldwin, Just above My Head (New York: Dell Publishing,

1978), 209.


34. Edelman, “The Part for the (W)hole,” 70–71.35. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 63.36. Guattari puts it this way: “How do certain semiotic segments achieve

their autonomy, start to work for themselves and to secrete new Welds of refer-ence? It is from such a rupture that an existential singularization correlative tothe genesis of new coefWcients of freedom will become possible. This detach-ment of an ethico-aesthetic “partial object” from the Weld of dominant signiW-cations corresponds both to the promotion of a mutant desire and to theachievement of a certain disinterestedness” (Chaosmosis, 13).

37. On Baldwin’s awareness of the gap between lyric and song, see JoséEsteban Muñoz, DisidentiWcations: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 21.

38. In Thelma Golden, ed., Black Male: Representations of Masculinity inContemporary American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art,1994), 102. For a more comprehensive account of Till’s murder, the events lead-ing up to it, and its aftermath, see Stephen J. WhitWeld, A Death in the Delta:The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

39. Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook, 51–52.40. Ibid., 201–2.41. Roland Barthes says that “[p]hotography has something to do with

resurrection.” Later, I’ll try to extend this assertion by way of, against, andthrough some of Barthes’s formulations of photography. See his Camera Lucida:ReXections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,1980), 82.

42. WhitWeld informs us that “Bobo was self-assured despite a speechdefect—a stutter—that was the consequence of nonparalytic polio that he hadsuffered at the age of three.” See WhitWeld, A Death in the Delta, 15 and note,also, WhitWeld’s documentation of Ms. Bradley’s argument that the attributionto Till of an attempted transgressive, transracial seduction on the part of hismurderers was in part the function of their inability to decipher Till’s brokenspeech. See also Mackey’s “Cante Moro” for more on the enabling disabilitiesof “crippled speech,” its relation to referents unavailable to moaning’s or hum-ming’s cutting augmentation of the verbal.

43. WhitWeld, A Death in the Delta, 15.44. Julia Kristeva works fruitfully in the Weld determined by the opposi-

tion of mimesis and analytic-interpretive knowledge. I want to acknowledge


that work here as well as the necessity for a full account of that work. Thatnecessity is particularly pronounced in work that is, on the one hand, attuned tothe encountering of maternity and phonic materiality in a way that is very muchinXuenced by Kristeva and, on the other hand, driven by an engagement withBarthes at a moment in his career when the inXuence of Kristeva is especiallyevident in his work. I intend to provide such an account very soon. Meanwhile,Kristeva speaks very lucidly on the relation between mimesis and knowledge in“A Conversation with Julia Kristeva,” in Julia Kristeva: Interviews, ed. RossMitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 31.

45. I want to acknowledge, here, the work of Karen Sackman on therelation between overtone and political mobilization. The chance to discussthese matters with her was crucial to the development of my ideas in this essay.I should say, too, that our discussion was prompted in large part by RandyMartin’s extraordinary book Critical Moves.

46. Amiri Baraka, “When Miles Split!” in Eulogies (New York: MarsilioPublishers, 1996), 145–46.

47. There is more to be said elsewhere regarding the photographic appa-ratus, the production of a sound that allows the production of image. Thanks tomy colleague Barbara Browning for opening this up.

48. Mackey speaks, with regard to Baraka and his reading and rewritingof Lorca in the late 1950s and early 1960s, of “a well-known, resonant historyof African-American fugitivity and its well-known, resonant, relationship toenslavement and persecution.” He adds, “The way in which fugitivity assertsitself on an aesthetic level . . . is important as well. The way in which Baraka’spoems of this period move intimates fugitive spirit, as does much of the musicthat he was into. He writes of a solo by saxophonist John Tchicai on an ArchieShepp album, ‘It slides away from the proposed.’ . . . That sliding away wantsout.” Again, see Mackey, “Cante Moro.”

49. Barthes associates the state, shall we say, of having made no obser-vations with kindness: “In this little girl’s image I saw the kindness which hadformed her being immediately and forever, without her having inherited it fromanyone; how could this kindness have proceeded from the imperfect parentswho had loved her so badly—in short: from a family? Her kindness was speciW-cally out-of-play, it belonged to no system, or at least it was located at the limitsof a morality (evangelical, for instance); I could not deWne it better than by thisfeature (among others): that during the whole of our life together, she never


made a single “observation.” This extreme and particular circumstance, soabstract in relation to an image, was nonetheless present in the face revealed inthe photograph.” It remains for us to think the consequences, beyond all of whatmight be seen as admirable or loveable, of the placement, by and in relation toBarthes (himself Wgured earlier in his own text as a deWnite sentimental and the-oretical observer), of this idealized preobservationality. See Barthes, CameraLucida, 69.

50. This is all to say that ultimately what remains constant in Barthes’sthinking on photography is the use of the black example. And one must thinkhard about what that allows him to do; it’s neither liberal acknowledgment norpetty racist invocation/dismissal, though that’s the trajectory his use takes, andwe could talk about that as well. Ask the North African workers of the Goutted’Or district of Paris? Ask the parents of Emmett Till? OK.

51. Ibid., 76–77.52. Ibid., 26.53. Ibid., 40.54. Ibid., 25–28.55. Ibid., 71 (Barthes’s emphasis).56. Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette

Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 101.57. Ibid.58. Ibid., 102.59. In The Threshhold of the Visible World (and here I thank David Eng

for bringing this to my attention), Kaja Silverman looks at Barthes’s distinc-tion between the wounding effect of the punctum and the normative “‘voice’ of‘knowledge’ and ‘culture’” with which he associates the studium. Silvermancogently critiques Barthes’s valorization of and failure to displace the ego, not-ing “the limited nature of the gains to be realized when [Barthes’s] revisionaryact of looking does not involve at the same time a realignment of self and other.”She adds, “One is left with the disquieting sense that whereas Barthes con-sistently apprehends the photographs about which he writes from a viewingposition which is radically divergent from that indicated by the metaphoricgeometral point (associating an African American woman, for instance, withhis aunt), his own sovereignty vis-à-vis the object remains unquestioned.”Ultimately, as Silverman claims, “The Wgures depicted in the photograph serveonly to activate [Barthes’s] own memories, and so are stripped of all historical


speciWcity. Barthes’s recollections might thus be said to ‘devour’ the imagesof the other.” The simultaneously lost and operative singularity that Barthesgrieves for is his own. And the problem, here, is not the loss of the object thatwas there but the never having been there of Barthes’s own absolutely singularobjectlessness. Again, Silverman’s formulations here seem absolutely correct. Iwould only augment them in the following ways. One, the refusal or inability todisplace the sovereign ego is not only a failure to realign self and other but afailure to realign the individual and the collective, so that the repression of dif-ference is also the repression of a certain ensemblic publicity that is activated inand as sound, where sound is irreducible to voice and, thus, to the meanings thatcomprise dominant culture and knowledge. Two, the devouring of the images ofthe other in which Barthes engages is, in some ways, a predictable effect of thespeciWc theory of history that animates Barthes’s ahistoricism. The discourse ofslave narrative, for instance, is massively infused with examples of the submis-sion of black bodies to a scopic regime that has, as one of its effects, the renewal,if not instantiation, of white interiority. This process is no less pronounced forthe development of that white interiority that is identiWed as radically divergent(from the metaphoric geometral point or from the political and/or aestheticnorms that are associated with that geometral point) or avant-garde. This is notto say that it is not surprising that Barthes associates an African Americanwoman with his aunt; it is to say that it is also not surprising that Barthes makessuch an association.

I will try to say more about how such interiority as that of Barthes ispossible only in contradistinction to that incapability of science or theory, thatinability to make—or lack of concern with making—observations, that inter-minably looked-at failure to look, that speciWcally black phonic materiality thatmarks, if you will, the return of the repressed studium in the punctum, in shortthat presubjective position outside of history that has been associated with theAfrican with equal vigor in valorizations of tradition, on the one hand, and dis-continuity, on the other. As I imply here and elaborate below, a fuller attemptto move past such a structure would require an attunement not only to the waysin which the aesthetics of black spectatorship and audition as black performanceis tied to a general phonography of the photograph, but to how that complexis, in turn, tied to an improvisation through the opposition of interiorityand ensemblic publicity. Of course, Silverman’s work—including especially TheAcoustic Mirror, her wary critique of the phallocratic deployment of what she


understands to be a degrading reduction of feminine voice to feminine screamin classic cinema—is very useful to such a project. See The Threshold of the Visi-ble World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 180–85.

60. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 64.61. Louis Althusser, “The International of Decent Feelings,” in The

Spectre of Hegel, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 1997), 21–35.62. If I have taken Barthes to task for his overlooking of Ms. Bradley’s

role in the ongoing production and display of the famous, terrible, beautifulphotograph of her murdered son, it has been, in part, a result of a comparisonof Ms. Bradley’s willingness, and Barthes’s refusal, to show the image of theloved one who is dead. In basing my analysis at least in part on such a compar-ison, I failed to take into account two things: Wrst, Ms. Bradley’s more recent andmore enduring reticence at reproducing the photograph of her son (which ispartly why I do not reproduce it here); second, the experiential knowledge ofhow terrible, if terribly beautiful, it is to look at and show the image of the lost.Nevertheless, I cannot disavow the arguments I have made here; the problem isnot that they are wrong but that I didn’t know how right they were, and so failedto fully account for the intensity of the knowledge of loss in Barthes and in Ms.Bradley. Now, after a spell of looking at pictures I can’t look at, of being unableto show you a photograph of my mother in a book that is about nothing but her,I know more about what I thought I knew.

63. Now’s the time brieXy to consider the place of aural performance inthe lecture, a form J. L. Austin says he hates. How, for instance, is one to takethe relation between aurality and repetition? SpeciWcally, what is the status ofthe repetitions that begin each chapter, which is to say each lecture in the set oftranscribed lectures that make up Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, secondedition, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1962, 1975)? Are Austin’s recapitulations—designed to help him and usremember our place by abbreviating previously enacted elaborations—marksof an iterability he can’t control, signs of an immaturity of speech that writingwill have overcome, an ancillary quality of speech that Saussure decries that isexacerbated by the para-verbal, gestural baggage of speech that is particularlydisturbing to Austin? What have these repetitions, what has this messy iterabil-ity, to do with the constellation of pitch, tone, sound, voice? Does the concernwith voice in philosophy of Austin’s student, Stanley Cavell, parallel Derrida’sconcern with idiom? Nation is an immediate background against which idiom


emerges for Derrida; it’s no less powerful in Cavell. Voice and sound in philos-ophy are both personal and national for him—not to hear Thoreau’s or Austin’svoice/sound is not to notice their distinctiveness and their nationality. Or, notto hear Emerson’s sound in Nietzsche is not to hear a speciWc Americanness inNietzsche. For Cavell, to have an ordinary language is to have a national lan-guage, an idiom. Here voice is tied to speech, to the nationalized performanceof an ordinary language. And for Derrida, idiom is always tied to sound and, forthat matter, to autobiography: the achievement of the old-new language willhave been, for him, a coming into voice, as bell hooks might say, that is or willhave been a coming into or upon, a recording, of “the sound of Algeria.” If weback up and think this idiomatic mark in speech as a kind of habitation withinan ordinary language, and if we think a given ordinary language along the linesof the distinction between competence and performance, as Chomsky outlinesit, then we see another essential point of commerce between ordinary languageand performance: this is to say that ordinary language exists only in perfor-mance. This will be, then, another source of Austin’s profound ambivalence withregard to the constellation of performance, drama, theatricality. The search for auniversal language is to be carried out only by way of a lecture whose phonetic and ges-tural performativity is irreducible. And this is, of course, tied to the sense Austinbegins with of performatives as masqueraders, utterances that look like but arenot statements. One way we could put the problematic Austin hips us to is this:how can a performance or performer be essential to and as the ordinary?

Or, put another way: Austin begins with a desire to isolate and valorizeordinary language over against the language of metaphysics and the phantasmiclanguage of positivism. He speciWcally wants to argue, against the logical posi-tivists, that there are utterances that are, on the one hand, not veriWable state-ments and, on the other hand, not nonsense. More precisely he wants to “playOld Harry” with two “fetishes,” which is to say two binary oppositions, two ofwhat Cavell calls false alternatives (and note the interesting way the idea of thefetish, the notions of value it carries by way of Marxian and Freudian registerscomes into play here as tied to or clearly manifest in the “false alternative”): thevalue/fact fetish and the true/false fetish, two fetishes, or dogmas, one mightsay, of positivism. The originary distinction between performative and consta-tive and its complex elaboration and/or degradation into the Weld delineated bylocution, illocution, and perlocution is the way Austin wants to get to this gameof Old Harry and here is where all the problems and the interest lie. In order to


obliterate false alternatives Austin must Wrst indulge in a performance (pretend,masquerade, be, in some sense, nonserious or poetic or theatrical), and he mustbroach a kind of generality that his mode of analysis, his exclusionary choices,decries. Austin’s aspiration demands a totalizing performance. One questionthis raises: is there anything other than totalizing performance? I think thereis not. Part of what I’d like to think about is how it is that what I take to bethe undeniable fact of iterability is the condition of possibility of a totalizingperformance.

Meanwhile, Austin needs to perform in order to bring off his seriousintentions. Derrida says that the serious utterance is always shadowed by aninternal other that is its condition of possibility. What is spoken or taken seri-ously can always be, must always potentially be, spoken or taken otherwise. Thisis to say that Austin’s performance anxiety is part of a general phenomenon.Nevertheless, and this is Cavell’s central and decisive contribution—a remindergiven him by Wittgenstein and Austin, prophets of the ordinary—in spite of therisk iterability bears, something is often said by way of an utterance; some-thing—content—is carried, smuggled, carried across or over or off, conveyed.And the point is that the danger inherent in iterability (the specter of the the-ater, of pretense, of nonseriousness) is the saving power of such conveyance.Performatives, those utterances that masquerade as statements but are neitherveriWable nor nonsensical, are tied to a kind of nonseriousness manifest in andas some dissociative “backstage artiste” who would duplicate or reiterate theplay. On page 10, Austin attempts to distinguish, in a beautiful little footnote,between types of performers—those who would enable as opposed to those whowould duplicate the play; I don’t think the distinction holds. Performatives arealways performers, dark ladies, wearing the mask that grins and lies, bearers ofuncategorizable infelicity in the make-up of well-formedness.

Derrida and others after him show that the problem of iterability is tiedto the problem of theatricality, of the necessary, multiple, anarchic, and tragi-comic performances of performatives. These problems are tied to that of total-ity as well. This is to say that avoidance of the univocal need not be tied to orinstantiated in an avoidance or refusal of the general. This requires recastingthe parasitic, duplicative backstage artiste as well as the fastidious and enabl-ingly codependent backstage techie out of their fetishistic opposition to oneanother. It demands a breakdown of the opposition between original (authentic,sincere, paradoxically serious) performance and duplicative performer by way of


an assertion of the multiplicative, invaginative, cutting, augmentative, ensem-blic force of a performance. (This will have recognized the antipathy towardduplication or reproduction as an antipathy toward a performance or theatri-cality, one manifest most clearly in the need for any given performance’sdisappearance in lieu of metaphysical formulations of Performance or Perfor-mativity.) That force is essential and essentializing. And this, in turn, is allbound up with the distinction—shall we say a true alternative—between mean-ing and force that Austin gives us as replacement for a certain false alternativebetween force and truth. This is to say you have to think about the conveyanceand the truth value of the “merely” phonetic act and think, more generally,about what’s at stake when imagining another idea of truth—as unconcealmentand not adequation—the relation between truth and saying something is ani-mated as well.

Cavell argues, against a certain symptomatic Derridean reading, thatAustin is actually enabled, rather than stymied, by the breakdown between theperformative and the constative and, more generally, by the way his classes(of the classes of acts, speech acts, locutions, illocutions, infelicities) blur suchthat “all aspects are present in all classes.” The erotic response (an) ordinarylanguage gives to analytic violence is felicitous for Austin; the breakdown of theorginal distinction between performative and constative works in relation to atotalizing intuition or drive in the ordinary, the ensemblic force of iterationinstantiated by and in the “merely” phonetic act, the conveyance, the feeling, ofa structure. Black performance is, in part, the ampliWed, previously given sound-track of this masquerade, this pageant of “aspect dawning.” There will havebeen no performance without it. It requires thinking more rigorously how the“merely” phonetic act has illocutionary force or produces perlocutionary effects.Again this is a question of aspect, where the ethico-temporal problematic blursand blurs into the problematic of class, set, ensemble. One has to think aboutwhat’s at the core and envelops and blurs the set of the sets, of locution (sayingsomething with meaning [sense + reference]), illocution (doing something insaying something), and perlocution (doing something by saying something).

At the same time, according to Cavell, voice does not exist in the purelyphonetic act. Here’s where the distinction between sound and voice that breaksdown in his usage of them re-emerges. The sound of philosophy that Cavellwants to recover is always tied to meaning. I would here join with Derrida whereCavell charges him with indulging in a certain animism. I’d even link such


indulgence to a kind of animalism that Austin is always pointing out, where themere making of noises is the purview of monkeys. There are limits to Derrida’sanimism or animalism, his sense of soul you might say, that I’d wanna go past.I have to linger in the music in the interest of a more elemental or anim(al)isticsound of/in philosophy, one that disrupts meaning and the sign, and the hege-mony of the signiWer over the psyche. I would follow Austin and Cavell, then,in acknowledging the importance of the circumstances of the speech act, but Iwould also point to the need for a more detailed and expansive engagement withthat which we could think about, using Austin’s designation, as the accompani-ments of the utterance: not only winks, pointings, gestures, frowns, and othersuch visible markers but tones of horror and, beyond and before that, certain cutaugmentations of voice (meaning, a certain look or style or make-up tied to aperformance that visualizes, thereby mut(at)ing, sound; interesting, though, tothink the effects of sound looking like a black woman) by way of multiple self-accompaniment. The point, here, is that iterability instantiates (the) ensemble,and it does so not as a pure effect of writing but as the effect of soundwriting,of a phonographic interruption of voice/speech/tone/look by the generalizingwriting of the phonetic act. The phonetic act cuts and abounds the phono-logo-phallo-centric Weld presided over by meaning and the sign in their impossiblephonetic reduction. The phonetic act marks the interinanimation of birth andinheritance; it’s the old-new thing, cutting mastery and the master’s passionateutterance by way of an out response, its circumstances, accompaniments, andanim(al)ism. This is the new science and old inheritance of value. It movesthrough the fetish and materiality’s disruption of the fetish. It moves through,or by way of, the ordinariness of performances.

Finally, how can we begin to ask more rigorously what performancestudies will be in the renewed light of performances and their ordinariness. Pay-ing close attention to Austin’s attention to performatives is a crucial elementto that more rigorous asking. This is to say that we must follow that trajec-tory, that conveyance or telepathy, feel that structure, between performativesand performances across the unbridgeably vast and immeasurable small “dis-tance” between them. That path moves through these three lectures. Thatpath moves through these lectures as they mark certain ordinary events. Itmoves also through the intersection of the two sets of three lectures I’m inter-ested in here. A passage in Derrida’s lecture which remains partially unheard inCavell’s reading of Derrida’s partial hearing of Austin marks the last step of this


choreography: Différance, the irreducible absence of intention or assistancefrom the performative statement, from the most ‘event-like’ statement possible,is what authorizes me, taking into account the predicates mentioned just now,to posit the general graphematic structure of every ‘communication.’ Above all,I will not conclude from this that there is no relative speciWcity of the effects ofconsciousness, of the effects of speech (in opposition to writing in the tradi-tional sense), that there is no effect of the performative, no effect of ordinarylanguage, no effect of presence and of speech acts. It is simply that these effectsdo not exclude what is generally opposed to them term by term, but on thecontrary presuppose it in dyssemtrical [sic?] fashion, as the general space oftheir possibility.” Derrida goes on in the section called “Signatures” to say thatthat general space of possibility of the list of effects (of speech, of the perfor-mative, of ordinary language, of presence, of speech acts) is writing in the non-traditional sense, writing as “spacing, as the disruption of presence in the mark.”My concern has been to examine these effects in the light of this at once otherand more fundamental writing and to think them in their relative speciWcity orwithin the relative speciWcity of a particular and differentiated “context” or“history.” More speciWcally, I’m trying to examine, in the light of writing, theeffects of the black ordinary, of black speech, of black presence. My suspicion isthat such examination is fruitful precisely to the extent that it puts the Der-ridean asymmetry in play such that presence and absence are each the other’scondition of possibility; so that writing and the ordinary are interlocking total-ities, each invaginative of the other, each disruptive and augmentative of theother as mutual conditions of possibility. These speciWcities and generalitiesare known by way of the materialities of various workings of various surfaces,by way of what Butler calls the residue of the social.

Another formulation of this project, mentioned above in my acknowledg-ments, is then given in Cavell, at the end of A Pitch of Philosophy, by way of itsown schedule (Nietzsche, Bloch), fully intelligible for me only after the fact ofDerrida (since speech is only given to us now after we’ve been given writing—there is no phoné but for phonography, the cut augmentation and condition ofpossibility of phonetic writing): “Am I ready to vow, as when Bloch asked uswhether we heard through to Bloch, that I have the ear, that I know my mother’smother tongue of music to be also mine?” One of the aims of the encounter oflectures and lecturers that this note attempts to prepare is technical. PerhapsAustin, Cavell, and Derrida only partially hear each other because the speakers


(Marvin Gaye, Kenneth Cockrel, Angela Davis)—in all of their phonographicdisruptiveness and distortiveness—weren’t properly, or elsewhere were too prop-erly, hooked up.

See Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1994), and Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” inMargins of Philosophy, trans. and with additional notes by Alan Bass (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1982), 309–30.

64. Finally Got the News. Prod. Stewart Bird, Peter Gessner, RenéLichtman, and John Louis Jr., in association with the League of RevolutionaryBlack Workers. Perf. Kenneth Cockrel, John Watson, Chuck Wooten. BlackStar Productions, 1970.

65. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 68–69.

66. Ibid., 68–69, n. 86.67. Ibid., 75.68. Ibid., 75, n. 97.69. Ibid.70. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying,

updated ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1998).71. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpre-

tation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: Universityof Illinois Press, 1988), 347.

72. Ibid.73. See Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, 72–78.74. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 24.75. Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On, Motown, 1971.76. Marvin Gaye, “Since I Had You,” I Want You, Motown, 1976.77. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890–

1940 (Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 1989), 68.78. See Angela Y. Davis, “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia,”

in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Oxford: Black Publishers, 1998).79. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 68, n. 86.80. See Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminisms: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey,

Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon, 1998).81. Davis, “Afro Images,” 278.


Resistance of the Object: Adrian Piper’s Theatricality

1. See Robert Storrs, “Foreword,” in Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out ofSight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 1: xviii–xix. Piper discusses Krauss’s for-mulation without naming Krauss, placing it within the framework of a largercritique of the convergence of ontological fallacy and socioeconomic presump-tion in the (construction of the) art world, in “Critical Hegemony and AestheticAcculturation,” Noûs 19, no. 1 (1985): 29–40. Piper revises and expands this cri-tique in “Power Relations within Existing Art Institutions,” in Out of Order, 2:63–89. Here are the relevant passages from “Critical Hegemony,” 30–31.

“A commitment to a career as an art practitioner requires that one isWnancially independent, or that one’s family is, or that one possesses other eco-nomically remunerative skills, or that a permanently Spartan lifestyle can beregarded as a novelty or a virtue, rather than as proof of social failure.

“This precondition to professional commitment functions as a mecha-nism of selection among creatively inclined individuals for whom economichardship has been, up to that point, a central reality. Art institutions in theirpresent incarnations will tend to attract individuals for whom economic andsocial instability are not sources of anxiety, for they have correspondingly lessreason to sacriWce the vicissitudes and satisfactions of self-expression to thenecessities of social and economic pressure.

“One immediate effect of this social and economic preselection is to cre-ate a shared presumption in favor of certain artistic values, i.e., a concern withbeauty, form, abstraction, innovations in media, and politically neutral subjectmatter. Let us roughly characterize these as formalist values. Since economicallyadvantaged individuals often import such values from an economically advan-taged, European background environment, and since existing art institutionsfavor the selection of such individuals, it follows that these institutions will bepopularized by individuals who share these values.

“. . . [T]hose creative products dominated by a concern with political andsocial injustice, or economic deprivation, or that use traditional, or ‘ethnic,’ or‘folk’ media of expression, are often not only not ‘good’ art; they are not art atall. They are, rather, ‘craft,’ ‘folk art,’ or ‘popular culture’; and individuals forwhom these concerns are dominant are correspondingly excluded from the artcontext.

“The consequent invisibility of much non-formalist, ethnically diverse artof high quality may explain the remark, made in good faith by a well-established


critic, that if such work didn’t generate sufWcient energy to ‘bring itself to one’sattention,’ then it probably did not exist. It would be wrong to attribute thisclaim to arrogance or disingenuousness. It is not easy to recognize one’s com-plicity in preserving a state of critical hegemony, for that one’s aesthetic inter-ests should be guided by conscious and deliberate reXection, rather than byone’s socioculturally determined biases, is a great deal to ask. But by refusingto test consciously those biases against work that challenges rather than rein-forces them, a critic insures that the only art that is ontologically accessible toher is art that narrows her vision even further. And then it is not difWcult tounderstand the impulse to ascribe to such work the magical power to ‘generateits own energy,’ introduce itself to one, garner its own audience and marketvalue, and so on. For nearly all objects of consideration can be experienced asanimatedly and aggressively intrusive if one’s intellectual range is sufWcientlysolipsistic.”

I intend brieXy to address this solipsism as it manifests itself in the criti-cism of Michael Fried. This address is, however, only in the interest of framingan engagement with Piper’s art and thought. I hope to show why the frame isnecessary and essential even as it is broken. Part of what’s at stake is the recog-nition that Piper’s critique of critical hegemony and critical solipsism is struc-tured by an asserted disbelief in, or critical debunking of, the fetish characterof the art object. Notions of the artwork’s essential energy or aggressivity—whether demonized, as we shall see, in Fried or valorized in Krauss—are unac-knowledged ideological effects of an acculturation that emphasizes formalistvalues, according to Piper. However, part of what I’ll begin to argue here isthat Piper’s work—which is, in a quite speciWc way, to say Piper—constitutes amassive and rigorous rematerialization of the art object whose most prominentfeature is the ongoing and resistant assertion of self-generated energy, impulse,drive. I intended to show that to experience Piper or the Piperian artwork is toenter a zone of ontic aesthetic productivity and a history of performance thatundermines Piper’s own Kantian formulation that “artworks without words aredumb” (“Critical Hegemony,” 33). This is to say that I intend to argue—by wayof Aunt Hester and her line, which includes Piper (who knows much about thecomplex and open relationship between slavery, art, and the freedom of theobject)—against Piper’s notion (later extended and elaborated by Phelan) thatperformance, in its nonreproductivity, constitutes a bulwark against (or a solu-tion to the problem of ) the fetishization of the art object. Performance is,


rather, the occasion to think the fetish character of the art object and its secret,its mystery, anew. To assert this is to move with and against Piper’s richly inter-nally differentiated—if not contradictory—discourse on the object. See her“Performance and the Fetishism of the Art Object,” in Out of Order, 1: 51–61;“Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object,” in Out ofOrder, 1: 29–53; and “Pontus Hulten’s Slave to Art,” in Out of Order, 1: 187–92.See also Peggy Phelan, “Broken Symmetries: Memory, Sight, Love,” in Unmarked.

2. See Piper, Out of Order, 2: 127–48.3. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical

Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press,1999), 116–47.

4. See Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The CollectedEssays and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4: 85–93.

5. See Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” inThe SanctiWed Church (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981), 49.

6. Piper, Out of Order, 2: 177.7. Fried, “Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop,” in Discussions in

Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 1987), 55–56.8. Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990),

6. An earlier version of this formulation is quoted and analyzed by StephenMelville in his Philosophy beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 13.

9. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 144–47.10. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 53.11. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 145.12. Amiri Baraka, “John Coltrane (1926–1967): I Love Music,” in Eulo-

gies (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1996), 2.13. Piper, Out of Order, 1: 27.14. See Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-

Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,1997); and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schiz-ophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Law (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

15. Piper, Out of Order, 1: xxxix.16. Ibid., xxxix–xl. For an excellent analysis of the cultural import of

racial and sexual minorities’ restricted rights of privacy, see Phillip Brian Harper,


Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations (New York: NewYork University Press, 1999).

17. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 85.18. The thing (Ding) is passive, according to Kant. It’s that to which

nothing can be imputed, and is opposed to “a person [who] is a subject whoseactions can be imputed to him.” The thing is without freedom and spontaneity.A human being acting in response to inclinations, acting as means to another’sends, is a thing. At the same time, the thing or thing as such is metaphysicalsubstance, that undetermined thingness in general that is a condition for thepossibility of experience in general and is, likewise, a condition for the possi-bility of objects of experience. A Gegenstand is an object that conforms to thelimits of intuition and understanding. When an object of experience is madeinto an objects of knowledge, it becomes an Objeckt. Part of what’s at stake here,which I can only begin to explore, is the paradoxical character of intuition(space and time, the transcendental aesthetic) as condition of and conditionedby objects of experience or sense, as both the immediate relation to objects andthat which occurs only insofar as the object is given to us. This temporal gap ofthe object is like the temporal gap of the subject—that it must be called intoexistence, that the fact that it is called indicates it already exists—that Butlerisolates and reads with a rhythmically rigorous insistence in The Psychic Lifeof Power. Just as the subject, according to Althusser, is made possible by thecall that its prior existence makes possible, so is the object made possible by theintuition that its prior existence makes possible. This immediacy of intuitiveapprehension is presentness, in Fried’s language.

I should here acknowledge the usefulness of Howard Caygill’s A KantDictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). The quotation above from Kant is in AKant Dictionary, 304.

19. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and IanMcLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 45.

20. Ibid., 54–55.21. Ibid., 64.22. Ibid., 59.23. See Spivak, A Critique, 1–111; also Robert Bernasconi, “Who Invented

the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,”in Race (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 11–36.

24. For me, that link is constituted by Artaud and Derrida’s reading of


him. In “La Parole SoufXée” Derrida addresses Artaud’s critique of the wayspeech and writing have worked in the theater. Artaud desires writing, accord-ing to Derrida, that is not a transcription of speech but a transcription ofthe body, a writing on the body, gesture, movement, something, according toDerrida, no longer controlled by the institution of the voice. Artaud is after “theoverlapping of images and movements [that] will culminate, through the collu-sion of objects, silences, shouts, and rhythms, or in a genuine physical languagewith signs, not words, as its root.” As Derrida says, “the only way to be donewith freedom of inspiration and with the spiriting away of speech [la parolesoufXée] is to create an absolute mastery over breath [le soufXée] within a sys-tem of nonphonetic writing.” Deleuze and Guattari, again by way of Artaud,speak of this nonphonetic writing as “primitive inscription,” and their languagemarks the spot of a metaphysics that is always primitively anthropological,primitive in its need and desire for the anthropological object, the anthropo-logical order, the one Spivak now calls, but in a different way, the nativeinformant.

Piper enacts this object of desire under the veiled rubric of the primitivethat is structured where and when the sciences of in/human/e administrationand the new sciences of value meet (anthropology, psychoanalysis, the critiqueof political economy, the genealogy of morals, general linguistics, evolution-ary biology). But in Piper, the primitive is critically unveiled as that which isnot what it is. Improvised, this collusive writing of “objects, silences, shouts,rhythms” is her performative language. “A universal grammar of cruelty.”

In the end, Derrida, picking up on his critique of Foucault’s Madness andCivilization, also in Writing and Difference, wants to challenge the notion thatmadness is purely the absence of the work. He wants to say that madness isthe work as well and, more importantly, that madness is just as much a part ofthe history of metaphysics as its other. This is to say that the appeal to madnessor to the absence of the work is still operating within the metaphysical, logo-centric reserve. Artaud and Foucault still operate within or “belong to the epochof metaphysics that determines Being as the life of a proper subjectivity.” Thisis to say that madness is still operative in its relation to proper subjectivity.This is the metaphysics “which Artaud destroys and which he is still furiouslydetermined to construct or to preserve within the same movement of destruc-tion . . . At this point, different things ceaselessly and rapidly pass into eachother and the critical experience of difference resembles the naïve and metaphysical


implications within difference, such that to an inexpert scrutiny, we could appearto be criticizing Artaud’s metaphysics from the standpoint of metaphysics itself,when we are actually delimiting a fatal complicity. Through this complicity isarticulated a necessary dependency of all destructive discourses: they mustinhabit the structures they demolish, and within them they must shelter an inde-structible desire for full presence, for nondifference. . . . The transgression ofmetaphysics through the ‘thought’ which, Artaud tells us, has not yet begun,always risks returning to metaphysics. Such is the question in which we areposed. [Remember—as one poses a net, surrounding the limit of a discursive net.]A question which is still and always enveloped each time that speech, protectedby the limits of a Weld, lets itself be provoked from afar by the enigma of Xeshwhich wanted properly to be named Antonin Artaud” (194–95). You inhabit thediscourse you’re trying to destroy as a function of the urge to destroy it and ofa formal tie, a tie of necessity to what you would destroy, a tie that is not Wxedbut is determinate. The thing is, at the end of La Parole SoufXée, which I justquoted, something else is going on, Wrst in the body of the text and then in thelittle appendage or attachment that cuts and augments it like a fold, a messy,unfoldable fold or gap in the envelope, a disruption of the pose. To speak of theenvelope, to thereby push it, so to speak, is to invoke the trace of a future dis-course in Derrida, a discourse of invagination that will emerge in relation to acertain understanding of the ear—the body and its folds will have literally cometo disrupt the artiWcial or artifactual totality of the pose. In “The Law ofGenre” Derrida speaks of invagination as that which cuts and augments thewhole, that which ruptures the limit in the interest of a larger reestablishment.Not a dismantling of the house but a stringent and rigorous remodeling andexpansion that is predicated on a critique of the idea of ownership and author-ship, of a certain exclusionarily determined architectural propriety. Meanwhile,the (delimiting and illimitable folds of the) body becomes the Wgure for what theXesh will have always done to speech. This is the enigma of the Xesh (as dis-tinguished from the body by Spillers) that provokes speech from outside ofspeech’s protective limits. Such provocation is the very structuring possibility ofDerrida’s work that his work is designed to mute as if it moves only in disbeliefof the ghost that is its constant companion, as if caught up in the desire for alistening out of earshot, as if folded into an old avoidance of material accent.Derrida’s work is bound up not only with the repression of accent’s irreducibledifferences, but with the unfortunate way that the French language conXates


voice and speech. To articulate the difference between body, voice, and speechis what remains (to articulate Xesh as a kind of Geschlecht, a gathering of differ-ences, the ante-logos, the afterparty), what Artaud attempts to do by way of thebody’s mastery over breath, spirit. Derrida’s attachment of the appendix to theessay betrays an awareness of an overheard difference, the differential wedgethat articulates it. The hole, the force, the new whole, is a re-en-gendering, asSpillers points out. It is an unmanning, as Schreber describes and Artaud enacts(their link being articulated in the work of Deleuze and Guattari). They carrythe knowledge of the mother’s touch and tongue, but repressively project it awayfrom themselves in and as the image of the primitive. As we’ve seen, Spillersdescribes this operation with regard to blackness, as blackness—the cut of cut-ting, burning Xesh, the Xeshly remainder in the absence—the cut augmentationand dispossessive spiriting (away)—of the maternal body. The ongoing steal-ing away of and from maternal body, maternal shore, maternal language. Stealaway (from) home. Born not in bondage but in fugitivity, in stolen breath andstolen life.

25. See Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Fac-ulties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1984).

26. See Marx, Capital, 1: 126.27. See Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben

Brewster (London: NLB, 1970), 145–57.28. Marx, “Communism and Private Property,” in Early Writings, trans.

Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage, 1975), 352.29. Ibid., 358.30. Ibid., 348.31. Ibid., 352.32. Ibid., 356.


accent, 14, 42, 77, 198, 205, 222,303n.24

acousmêtre, as described by Chion,220–21

Adorno, Theodor, 177, 179, 225, 226,227, 228, 256n1, 286n.28; and MaxHorkheimer Max, 286n.28

affect, 71, 117, 122, 154, 166, 184,199

Alexander, Elizabeth, 192, 195, 210Althusser, Louis, 208, 225, 252Anderson, Cat, 26anima, 11, 94, 95, 108, 138, 144–47,

164, 213animality, 31, 99, 145, 213, 240,

296n63Armstrong, Louis, 70, 72, 100, 108Artaud, Antonin, 31, 33, 35–38,

40–41, 270–71n81, 301–4n24aspect: dawning, noticing or seeing,

as conceptualized by Wittgenstein,90–92, 95, 97, 100, 138, 156,295n63; internal temporal

constituency, in Shakespeare’s“Sonnet 129,” 115–16

aurality, 6, 11, 47, 68, 117, 146, 175,179–80, 184, 185, 187, 189,221–22, 234, 254

Austin, J. L., 225, 292–96n63avant-garde, 25, 31–34, 39, 41,

86–87, 132, 148–49, 153, 156, 163,166, 167, 169, 233, 263n14

Ayler, Albert, 22, 180

background, as conceptualized bySearle, 101

Baker, Houston, 72, 187, 256n1Bakhtin, M. M., 98Baldwin, James, 36, 166, 172–75, 180,

184–87, 189–90, 192, 195Balibar, Étienne, 212, 223Banes, Sally, 149–50, 166, 169Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 69,

85–86, 88, 93, 95–96, 99–102,108–9, 113, 116–18, 120, 122–41,143–53, 155, 159–61, 163, 165,

Index

307

169, 174, 178, 185, 191, 205, 209,226, 239, 271–72n1, 278n69,281–82n102

Barrett, Lindon, 257n1Barthes, Roland, 200, 202, 204–7,

209–10, 290–92n59, 292n62bebop, 100being, 16, 58–59, 69, 91, 131, 133,

137–39, 142, 144–48Benjamin, Andrew, 28Benston, Kimberly W., 257n1black radicalism, 18, 24, 85–86, 94,

143, 153, 178–79, 215, 223, 231,241, 253

blackness, 1, 2, 8, 12, 16, 26–27,32–33, 35, 41, 70–71, 86, 113, 118,123–24, 132, 133, 142, 145,151–54, 160, 162–3, 169, 187, 202,205, 206, 215, 234, 255–56n1

blues, 101, 119–21, 197Bond, Julian, 26bone-deep listening, 67, 71, 83, 123,

200Boone, Elizabeth Hill, 50Booth, Stephen, 111, 275–76n43Bradley, Mamie, 193, 198, 206, 208,

209bridge, 18, 39, 73, 77, 83–84, 100,

121, 124, 229, 231, 237Brinton, Laurel, 275n42Brown, James, 22, 55Browning, Barbara, 289n37Butler, Judith, 2, 242

castration, 4, 156, 176–77, 179–80,184–85, 199

Cavell, Stanley, 260n13, 293–96n63Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 226Chion, Michel, 220–21Chomsky, Noam, 14Christian, Charlie, 72Clément, Catherine, 165Cockrel, Kenneth, 220, 224cognitive mapping, as discussed by

Jameson, 216–18, 219–223, 225,229–30

Coleman, Ornette, 287n28Coltrane, John, 60, 239commodity, 5, 6, 8–13, 17, 163, 166,

212–13, 214, 215, 230, 234, 251,299n1

communism, 12, 86, 165, 166, 229,252

cut, the, 1, 2, 12, 14, 24, 28, 33, 39,58, 70–71, 73, 82–82, 98, 100,122, 131, 136–38, 158, 162, 176,197, 200, 205, 224, 229. See alsosexual cut

Davis, Angela, 230–31Davis, Reverend Gary, 286n26Davis, Miles, 94, 100–2, 273n13Delaney, Beauford, 31, 34–37, 41Delany, Samuel R., 153–58, 164, 157Deleuze, Gilles, 240, 249–50Derrida, Jacques, 6, 47, 53–54, 56,

57, 29–30, 74–77, 87, 89, 97, 132–134, 144, 158, 173, 180, 186, 187,189–90, 201–2, 223, 238, 240, 243,245–50, 293–96n63, 301–04n24

Descartes, René, 180, 201Detroit, 211–29

308 – INDEX

Dolphy, Eric, 38, 63, 81–82Douglass, Frederick, 2, 3–6, 7, 10–11,

18, 165, 215, 251; on Aunt Hester,3–4, 5–6, 11, 16, 21, 22, 23, 166,241, 250–53

drive, 25–30, 87, 104, 124, 209, 229,256n1

Du Bois, W. E. B., 124Dumas, Henry, 180, 285n17

earthiness, 149–52, 165, 169Edelman, Lee, 171–72, 174, 180,

185–90, 192, 283–84n7Eisenstein, Sergei, 108–9, 120–22,

124elegy, 89–90, 94, 98–101, 117Ellington, Duke, 25–26, 30, 35–36,

159, 261n2Ellison, Ralph, 63–70, 73–74, 84–86,

134, 178, 218encounter, 4, 6, 11, 21, 34, 38, 40, 71Enlightenment, 7, 71, 72, 93, 95, 96,

131, 135, 146, 213, 240ensemble, 7, 16, 25, 31, 41, 43, 45,

47, 52, 54–55, 57–58, 67, 69, 72,76, 82–83, 85–86, 89, 92, 94–96,98–101, 104, 112, 118, 121–23,131, 133–35, 137–43, 145, 148,152, 156–57, 159, 161–62, 173–74,221, 223, 225, 255n1

eros, 25, 27–30, 132, 163, 209essence, 7, 144event, 11, 12, 30, 42, 47, 53–54, 125,

152, 211exteriority, 6, 34, 35, 38, 247–49,

255n1

Fanon, Frantz, 130fetishization, 13, 32, 177, 179–80,

231, 296n63Fineman, Joel, 109–11Five Spot, the, 152–55, 158, 163, 165,

166, 169Fortunati, Leopoldina, 16, 17Foucault, Michel, 145frame/framing 68, 108–9, 114–15,

120–21, 156, 205, 217, 236, 246; andthe parergon, 243–44, 246–49, 152

free jazz, 22, 100freedom, 2, 6, 7, 16, 71–72, 96, 108,

128, 136–37, 178, 180, 205, 242,256n1

Freud, Sigmund, 7, 25, 28–31, 76,176–79

Fried, Michael, 233–38, 243, 246–48,251, 254

fugitivity, 35, 202, 273n19, 289n48,304n24

Gaye, Marvin, 224–25, 227–29gaze, 34, 174, 177, 183–85, 190–92,

199, 233–34, 238–39Geist, 11, 94, 95, 108, 138, 144–47,

161, 164, 213Georgakis, Dan and Marvin Surkin,

217, 220, 224Geschlect, 133–34, 303n24gesture, 34, 39, 47–48, 50, 52, 59,

139, 140, 141, 208ghosts, 31, 44–46, 99, 161, 196Gilroy, Paul, 257n1glance/glancing blow, 34, 87, 199,

231, 233, 238–39

INDEX – 309

Glissant, Edouard, 7, 14glossolalia, 35, 38–39Gordon, Avery, 257n1Gordy, Berry, 225Greenberg, Clement, 234, 238,

242–43, 246Greenwich Village, 33–36, 41, 130,

153Guattari, Félix, 173, 175, 190, 240,

249–50, 284n8

Harlem, 33–36, 41, 144Harris, Wilson, 265n34, 285n14Hartman, Saidiya V., 1, 2–5, 242,

256n1Hegel, G. W. F., 31, 40, 203Heidegger, Martin, 87, 122, 124, 126,

127–28, 131–33, 136, 142–44,270n79, 273n18, 278n69

Hintikka, Merril B. and JaakkoHintikka, 140–41

Holiday, Billie, 102–6, 109, 113, 117,120–22, 124, 148, 150–53, 164–66,168

homoeroticism, 115, 150, 153, 163homographesis, as conceptualized

by Edelman, 186–87, 191,283–84n7

Hurston, Zora Neale, 1, 234Husserl, Edmund, 144, 203

iconicity: as conceptualized by Peirce,57, 89–91, 93, 95, 100; Wrst, 92, 99;second, 92, 97, 100–101

idiom, 41, 43, 45–47, 53, 76, 133,265–66n37, 292n63

improvisation, 11, 13–14, 25–26, 31,39, 41–47, 49–52, 54–55, 57,63–64, 67, 69, 72–76, 81–82, 83,87, 89–90, 92, 94–95, 98–99, 105,111, 118–19, 123–24, 130, 137,139, 142, 144, 159, 175, 177, 179,185, 191, 197, 201, 209–10,220–21, 228, 245

indexical present, as conceptualizedby Piper, 233

inscription, 13–14, 18, 64, 124, 211,227, 302n24

interiority, 115, 207, 237, 239, 241,247, 253, 291n59

invagination, as conceptualized byDerrida, 6, 18, 25, 27, 30, 34, 40,152, 156, 158–59, 191, 202,223–24, 229, 231, 235, 247, 250,252–53, 258n5, 303n24

invisibility, 68, 70, 72, 84, 155

Jackson, John L., Jr., 260n12James, C. L. R., 8, 252Jameson, Fredric, 216–22, 229jazz, 93, 100, 118–19, 128, 161,

165–66, 177, 185Jeffries, Herb, 27Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, AmiriJost, Ekkehard, 128–29justice, 58, 99, 128, 178, 199

Kant, Immanuel, 234–35, 243, 244,245–46, 248–50, 300–1n18

Kaprow, Allan, 154–56, 158Kelly, R., 215Krauss, Rosalind, 233

310 – INDEX

Kristeva, Julia, 166, 184, 278–79n7,288–89n44

labor, 16, 88, 192, 223, 226, 227, 251labor power, 6, 213, 251Lacan, Jacques, 83, 175, 177, 179–85,

285–86n26, 286n27League of Revolutionary Black

Workers, 211, 213, 216–17, 220,223, 229

Levine, Lawrence W., 257n1Levi-Strauss, Claude, 47–48, 50,

56–57Lincoln, Abbey, 5, 22–24, 286n28linger/lingering, 4, 58–60, 69, 70, 81,

84–86, 96, 99–100, 125, 136, 139,151, 162, 175, 178, 192, 210, 223,230

Locke, Alain, 40Lynch, Kevin, 229Lyons, Jimmy, 161

Mackey, Nathaniel, 6, 30, 35, 38, 63,67, 73–74, 78–81, 175–76, 193–96,224, 258–60n7, 273–74n19, 289n48

Martin, Randy, 262–63n14, 289n45Marx, Karl, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17,

18, 25, 31, 214–15, 227, 251–54Marxism, 179, 211–13, 217, 220, 253materiality, 7, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 24,

38, 39, 40, 64, 70, 145, 173, 186–87,191–92, 208, 211, 215–16, 235,238, 240, 244, 246, 248–50, 262n14

maternity, 12, 17, 37, 38, 39, 180,186, 202, 212, 214–16, 221, 224–25,235. See also motherhood

McDowell, Deborah E., 257n1meaning, 7, 25, 38, 42, 48, 52, 81,

102, 177, 180memory, 71, 173, 199, 200, 229–31metaphysics, 55, 58, 68, 98, 118, 138,

157, 187, 293, 302n24Michelson, Annette, 121Mingus, Charles, 25, 63, 169, 210mirror stage, 176, 178, 183–84Miyoshi, Masao, 32moan, 70, 102, 137, 198, 201, 206,

210–11modernism, 35, 93–94, 220, 233, 243modernity, 2, 35, 40, 70, 72, 86Monk, Thelonious, 153, 166montage, 47, 89, 118, 120–21, 224,

281–82n102motherhood, 6, 16, 36, 205, 209, 215,

241. See also maternitymourning, 84, 93, 98, 102, 196, 198,

201, 206, 210–11, 273n13mousike, 58–59, 267n56Mullen, Harryette, 257n1Muñoz, José Esteban, 288n37Murray, Albert, 33music, 6, 11–12, 16, 25, 30, 35, 42,

44–45, 54–57, 64, 67, 71, 73, 83,85, 91, 94, 96–97, 99–101, 118,125, 131, 136, 143, 145, 148, 155,159–61, 169, 175, 178, 184, 186,192, 199, 201, 209–10, 223–24

myth, 48, 50, 56–57, 59

narrative, 54–55, 68, 71, 105nationalism, 86, 130, 137, 147negrographesis, 186

INDEX – 311

Nielson, Aldon Lynn, 257n1Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7

object(s), 1, 10, 93, 95, 101, 111, 114,119, 124, 139, 141–42, 199, 208,235, 237–39, 241, 243, 248

objecthood, 18, 148, 234objectiWcation, 2objection, 12, 13, 14ocularcentrism, 46, 50, 117, 179, 183,

191, 197, 222, 235O’Hara, Frank, 149–51, 165old-new thing, 12, 57, 122, 124, 268,

296n63ontology, 5, 11, 85, 90, 99, 114, 124,

131–32, 136, 143–44, 147, 196,106, 108

organization, 25, 44–45, 46, 55–56,67, 81, 83, 96, 99, 101, 135, 157,192, 213, 222–23

origin, 5, 6, 14, 28, 57, 58, 60, 70, 71,73, 107, 136, 174

originarity, 5, 28, 130outness, 35, 81, 85, 149, 156, 160,

167, 255n1overtone, 22, 83, 198, 228, 289n45

painting, 114, 236, 246, 248Paris, 33, 34, 35, 36, 40Parker, Charlie, 152Parkin, David, 47–50, 52Parmenides, 58, 91passion, 11, 14, 18, 21, 200–201, 253Peirce, Charles S., 90–93, 98performance, 1, 12, 14–15, 16, 27, 39,

40, 43, 46, 47, 48, 79, 83, 85, 99,

106, 125, 139, 145, 147, 154, 158,162, 172, 195, 204, 206, 208, 231,253, 294; black performance, 2, 12,14, 16, 18, 25, 82, 86, 149, 151–52,153, 155, 215, 296n63

performance studies, 263, 296n63performativity, 122, 204, 206, 294n63personhood, 1, 16, 242, 245, 254Phelan, Peggy, 258n4phenomenology, 90–91, 93, 150, 206,

208phonic matter/phonic substance, 10,

12, 34, 38, 39, 85, 198, 204, 212,222, 225, 235; reduction of, 6, 7,13, 24, 179–80, 186–87, 190, 197,201, 205, 215

phonocentrism, 185–86, 201phonography, 14, 21, 86, 133, 139,

211, 213, 224, 235photography, 195–98, 200–202,

204–10, 230, 290n50phrase/phrasing, 41–43, 45, 52, 71,

75, 81–82, 138, 224, 229Piper, Adrian, 123, 233–34, 237–45,

247, 249, 250–54, 263n14,302n24

Plato, 54, 93poetry, 44–46, 51, 57, 58, 59, 90,

93–97, 109–11, 112, 113, 151, 187primal scene, 2, 4–5, 11, 176, 178,

185production, 6, 67, 211psychoanalysis, 74, 77, 174, 176–77,

179publicity, 154, 156, 163, 206, 240,

241, 255n1

312 – INDEX

Queen Latifah, 287n28queerness, 69, 162, 268–69n67

race, 45, 57, 67, 68, 108, 109, 113,118–19, 130, 132, 142, 145, 184,223

racialization, 68, 108, 115, 235racism, 31, 244rapture, 149–52, 155, 157, 169, 228reading, 2, 12, 41, 44, 49, 103,

112–13, 178, 188, 211reconstruction, 55, 57, 59, 87, 195,

229recording, 6, 11–12, 22, 34, 39, 43,

95, 97, 101, 119, 163, 166, 172,205, 212, 225, 250, 253; absence of,42, 81, 134

representation, 34, 46–47, 52, 82, 94,118, 147–48, 217–19, 222, 230,246, 248

repression, 5, 12, 124, 173, 208, 233reproduction, 4, 5, 7, 12, 14, 16, 18,

32, 87–88, 153, 154, 163, 224, 225,227

resistance, 16, 27, 106–7, 140, 166,174, 198, 226, 230, 233, 240, 242,256; of the object, 5, 12, 14, 134,225, 227, 234, 263n14

return, 36, 55, 60, 73, 76, 94, 118,123, 130, 132, 202

rhythm, 27, 47, 52, 138, 145–46, 148,169, 213, 223

ritual, 1, 32, 42, 45, 47–53, 57–59,163

Roach, Joseph, 257n1Roach, Max, 5, 22–23

Robinson, Cedric J., 18, 86, 253Ross, Andrew, 149–52, 165rupture, 6, 25, 30, 39, 69, 73, 209Russell, Bertrand, 208

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 94Saussure, Ferdinand de, 7, 13–14,

180, 186–87, 201, 215, 235, 238scene, 1, 4–5, 7, 11, 14, 41, 85, 86,

152, 167, 229, 235, 236, 239, 252Schechner, Richard, 32, 33Schreber, Daniel Patrick, 240Scott, Joan, 157–58scream, 1, 12, 21, 22, 39, 69, 72, 94,

96, 118, 165, 180, 186, 201, 213,215, 216, 224, 225, 240, 255n1,286n28, 292n59. See also shriek

Searle, John R., 101Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 69,

268–69n67self-analysis, 74, 104, 137, 237, 240,

244senses, 12, 25, 67, 83–84, 89, 96–97,

123, 183, 189, 191, 222–23, 229,250, 253

sensuality, 12, 47, 197, 205, 206, 211sexual cut, Mackey’s conceptualiza-

tion of 30, 32, 42, 72, 105, 121,132, 140, 151–52, 160, 169, 180

sexuality, 7, 23, 74, 76, 85–86, 113,119, 132–33, 135, 152–53, 184,192, 223, 227

Shakespeare, William, 108–10,114–15, 119–20

shriek, 14, 21, 125, 137, 176, 253. Seealso scream

INDEX – 313

Sidney, Sir Philip, 109–10sign, 7, 13, 47, 89, 91–92, 183, 185,

246silence, 145Silverman, Kaja, 179, 216, 220–21,

223, 231, 290–92n59singularity, 45–46, 50, 55, 57–58, 60,

67, 70, 74, 89–90, 96, 98–100, 108,111, 120–21, 125, 134, 139–40,155–56, 158–59, 163, 184, 202,205–7, 209, 234–35

slavery, 2, 4, 6, 15, 24, 32, 227,241–42, 291n59

Smith, Bessie, 166sound, 11, 25–26, 34, 39, 41, 44,

46–47, 39–40, 76, 97, 107, 117,123, 132, 145, 175, 178, 180, 183,185–85, 190–201, 205, 208, 210,211, 212, 221–226, 228, 230

spectacle, 1–2, 15, 217, 222–23speech, 6, 9, 12, 14, 21, 39, 78, 208,

213, 292n63Spillers, Hortense, 15–16, 155, 224,

303n24spirit, 13–14, 116, 125–26, 145, 147,

148, 196, 199, 215Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 162,

212–15, 223, 250, 302n24Strayhorn(e), Billy, 31, 35–39, 41subject, 2, 73subjectivity, 1, 4, 8, 11–13, 108–9,

111–15, 116, 121, 154, 242sublime, the, 155supplement, 52, 56, 59, 69, 71, 248–49surplus, 12, 25, 28, 31, 32, 35, 38, 39,

41, 253

suture, 178Suvin, Darko, 219swing, 25, 27synaesthetic, 82–83, 165syncopation, 85, 150, 153, 163–66,

167, 174, 236syncope, as conceptualized by

Clément, 153, 164–65syntax, 7, 237, 250

Taylor, Cecil, 25, 41–43, 44–47,51–52, 54–57, 59–60, 73, 82, 105,148, 153, 155–56, 158–59,264–65n29, 267n56, 268n66,279n80

Taylor, Paul, 166–67Till, Emmett, 192, 195–98, 200–1,

204, 206, 208–10, 288n42,292n62

time, 49, 64, 135, 147, 225, 226, 228tone/tonality, 54, 55, 57, 100, 118,

150, 177, 216, 221–23, 229–30, 235totality, 18, 54–57, 69, 73–74, 87,

89–90, 96–97, 99–100, 112, 119,122–23, 125, 135, 142, 153, 155,157, 158, 169, 173, 179, 189, 208,219–20, 222, 224, 230–31, 238,247, 252

trace, 6, 13, 17, 18, 45, 47, 57, 104,108, 122, 151, 153, 214

tragedy, 45, 89–90, 93–94, 96,98–101, 105–6, 119–20, 124, 130

transcription, 45–46, 64, 226transference, 6, 18, 105–6, 125, 174,

177, 179–80, 191, 251Trinh T. Minh-ha, 121

314 – INDEX

unconcealment, 71, 72, 133, 158,295n64

ungendering, as conceptualized bySpillers, 155

universality, 14, 26, 27, 33, 39, 47, 70,72, 96, 137, 162, 198, 202, 205–6,209, 223, 244, 250

utopia, 90, 93, 222utterance, 132; accompaniment to,

27, 35, 38, 75; as optical, 63

value, 6, 7, 10–12, 14, 15, 18, 32, 216,238, 296n63

Varadharajan, Asha, 256n1voice/voicing, 34, 37–38, 40, 55, 107,

117, 134, 135, 216, 224, 239

WhitWeld, Stephen J., 288n42Williams, Cootie, 25Williams, Raymond, 229Williams, Robert Pete 286n26Wittgenstein, Ludwig V., 88–93, 97,

100–1, 124, 127, 138–41,294n63

wounded kinship, as conceptualizedby Mackey, 176, 192, 211, 227

INDEX – 315

Fred Moten is associate professor of African-American studies at theUniversity of California, Irvine.

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